Thread: WWW or no WWW that is the question!

On some of my seo sites I have been asked repeatedly should we use www.example or http://example
and I have heard both sides of the debate about this.
I thought I would share some personal experience with any one asking that question.
-------------------------
I used non-www but then I saw that there was a disadvantage to this -- and that is when others (outside your seo team) are mentioning your website, they tend to put the www and due to that, the link juice just went to them, not us. I have recently started using the www version with my newer sites. I here people say use both versions...... NO! Google will see it as duplicate content and it will hurt you. It happened to me!
Has anyone else had a personal experience or an opinion about what I said? Please specify experience or opinion if you reply, both are great..... but only one is fact. Lol. Hey thats a good line right there!

---------- Post added 08-09-2013 at 07:55 PM ----------

Let me clarify what I meant about the link juice. Because they used the www and I was submitting by http we were missing that link juice. I was going to write something else and said "it went to them not us" ignore that please. My goof.

In cpanel you can easily 301 redirect all to either www or non-www. A 301 redirect will pass the link juice.

Old timers tend to use the www out of habit but newer users never got into the habit. Consistency in your link building and the 301 redirect for the strays along with a meta canonical tag should take care of all situations.

301 redirect exactly. great point. I forgot to mention that. The free .ML domain that is being given away forces the use of www. (if readers are not familiar with the free domain Blue Arrow posted it in the free links a couple of weeks ago)
Now one thing I was wondering is:
will using the 301 redirect mess up any link juice that is already there from the http posting? I could not imagine it would since it is simply directing the incoming www.

You can also use htaccess to 301 redirect:

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule .* http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

Originally Posted by Nemanja

You can also use htaccess to 301 redirect:

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule .* http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

I have never done that before. Can you explain more? All I have done was use the DNS controls and then use the 301 redirect option on my sitebuilder. However, the 301 redirect on site builder is for changed URL's so it does not work for the WWW. Any help on this would be very much appreciated, I bet others out there would like to hear it.

I believe that the cpanel redirect routine makes an automated .htaccess entry. It is found under the domains section in cpanel.

Basically it is same as cp redirect.
With htaccess file you do it kinda manually.

I have been doing like the old timers and putting www on everything. I wondered what the difference was. Can someone tell me why it was ever changed? A shot in the dark here, please don't laugh at my ignorance but did the www have something to do with the dot com extensions and now there are so many(dot)co;(dot)com;(dot)org;(dot)biz ?

WWW of course is the designator for World Wide Web. There were other digital networks that were in use at the time. Governments and Schools had networks for data transfer. See this WikipediA page: World Wide Web - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For this use htaccess 301 redirection program.