With or without the "www." ?
-
Is there any benefit whatsoever to having the www. in the URL?
My domain is quite long therefore I've not been using the www. however a few people have mentioned it's good practice to include it.
The www. forwards to the main URL (non www.) and I've set my preferred domain name in webmaster tools to the non www. so I'm thinking that should all be ok.
Just hoping I could get some of the experts views to make sure this is all ok. The site is a year old and I'm just starting to really get going on the link building so it's not too late to change if I'm wrong.
If others link to my site and include the www. will the link juice be passed, as I suspect many will include it without any thought?
-
Deviating slightly on the top here but I would say that link inclusion on social sites you should use services like bit.ly and not paste in the URL.
My reasoning for this is what with a bit.ly url if you add a + at the end you can see statistics for that particular link (how many clicks its had etc), which is nice and simple and saves crawling through Google Analytics to answer some simple fundamental questions.
In email signatures, leaflets and printed promotional material (where your typically short on space to use) then I agree it does make things shorter and look nicer, and who know maybe it will catch on and more and more people will start removing www. from their domains and it will then become more of a standard, for which Google and other search engines will probably use as a possible ranking factor.
I must admit this has been a great discussion on this topic.
-
small but good point
-
One other way of looking at this, especaly if you have a short domain is that a shorter url uses up less of character limits on social sites, forum sigs, or any other senario where you might otherwise have to use a url shortener to post the link.
It's a slight benifit, but it may mean the diffrence between sharing yourname.com or goog.gl/code, the former of which is usualy prefurable for brand reconition at least.
-
i think more would leave the www off when typing, but thats just my opinion. but more to the point i think more will leave it off as time goes on.
to make myself clearer, i think every day more and moe people realize it is un-necessary
of cause in your example i would leave it on.
in fact if a site had 11 links to www and 10 links to non www, i would leave it on, but if it had 10 each way, they i would leave it off as my preference. links is much more important
-
Recently we were faced with the same issue on behalf of a client. I made the decision to retain the www. My reasoning was based that this client had been live with their website since 1998 and had amassed literally thousands of backlinks all pointing to the www of his website. In my mind keeping his URL structure was more important than shortening a URL. His backlinks spoke volumes for his past success.
I am also of the opinion that a majority of end users will still type into a search www as prefix before the domain name. With that in mind it makes feel that they would also automatically type ‘www’ as a prefix when linking back to a site.
So, strictly from an SEO point of view I woudl use WWW.
-
agreed
-
Yeah that's fair enough but like I said it's not a deal breaker and there are more important things to spend time changing to benefit your site for search engines. I live by the rule, "If its not broke, don't fix it", until search engines decide that non-www is "better" or they decide to put more weighting on non-www domains then there is no point worrying about it.
-
I think if you go back a few years, people did expect to see a www, i think that is less so today, and even less so in the future.
but it is a small point really, the main thing is once you have made your decision, make sure you get your redirects and internal linking correct.
-
I agree it is not a big thing, but i cant agree on doing so because a majority of sites do it.
The resson i dont use www, is that it is un-necessary, i cant see any argument for it.
-
The article does not mention redirects, 301 redirects leak link juice, both google and bing have confirmed that, .
The article is how GWMT counts internal links, even if google search algorithm saw www and non www as internal, it would still see them as 2 different pages, and it would still not pass all link juice on a redirect, as it does not matter if the link is external or internal, all 301 redirects leak link juice.
-
If I remember there /was/ a good reason one way or the other for using cookieless domains and such to optimise image delivery e.t.c., it can only be done with your website on one and images on the other, but I can not remember which was around it was, and what senerio brings it about at the moment.
I prefur the www. version mostly due to all our competitors using it, so we look 'odd' when next to them. People expect to see the www.
-
Thanks for all of the replies, much appreciated. I think I shall leave it as it is as there doesn't appear to be any merit to moving across to the www. apart from the very small loss of link juice when people link to the www. and it gets 301'd.
-
In the grand scheme of things I don't see it being a big issue as Google's recent updates to the algorithm are targeted at over optimisation of content and weeding out poor quality pages from the SERP.
My point being that from an SEO perspective there are more important things to concern yourself with to ensure your website is ranking highly in Google for your chosen set of keywords.
-
I think many people have misinterpreted this article. They say that they have changed the way they categorise links in Webmaster Tools, it does not mention any change in the algorithm. Many comments on the article asked for clarification on this and here is the response:
"Re: all the search algorithm- and ranking-related questions: This update only changes how links are displayed in Webmaster Tools. It doesn't affect how links are valued in relation to the search algorithm or ranking. It has nothing to do with Panda, nothing to do with keywords, nothing to do with PageRank."
So you should still leak a bit of link juice from a 301.
-
Personally I think the non-www vs www seems a bit pointless, people very rarely type in the domain name into the address bar and even if they do type it without www. there will be a redirect in place to add that in for them.
In terms of search engines and the SERP page then yes it may look cleaner, but the end visitor isn't going to sit there and think, "oh this site isn't using www, i'll go to that site instead".
Its all down to personal preference but I would suggest leaving it is www.domain.com as this is what the majority of site seem to do (even SEOMoz!)
-
Google has changed their approach on this and now see www and non-www as the same (they do not even count it as a redirect anymore) googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html
-
I would not say not at all, they will lose a little as 301's leak link juice, they do not apss it all.
But either way you can have that problem.
-
I always use non-www, as it makes my domain name shorter. So long as you choose what your preference is in webmaster tools and 301 redirect the www to the non-www (like you did) then you will have no problems from Google.
The links to your website containing www. will not affect your link juice at all.
-
There is no reason to have a www, i dont have one on any of my domains, and recomend against it for my clients.
Imagine if people were call me www.alan, it would be stupid, so why call your web site www.domain.com
I believe this is a leftover from old unix servers, it is not needed today.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Changing a product page from "example.com" to "example.com/keyword" affect SEO and Ranking?
We're in a situation to move the page from "example.com" to "example.com/keyword". And adding new content to the "example.com" page. Does this change affect our ranking? If so how can we overcome this problem? Can anyone help?
On-Page Optimization | | Mohamednatheem0 -
Duplicate content - "Same" profile-information
Hi, I own a casting website with lots of profiles. Some of these profiles only typed in their firstname, email and age, when they registered on the site, and they haven't added more information ever since. From Crawl Diagnostics, I can see that there is "lots" of these profiles, which looks exactly the same (only showing age and firstname), allthought they are not the same. I could add which day the profile were created on the site, to maybe avoid these "duplications". The email will always be hidden. Or, how big an issue is this? Crawl Diagnostics tells me, that there is around 200 of these, and they are "marked" as High Priority. Any ideas on what to do? /Kasper
On-Page Optimization | | KasperGJ0 -
Site wide content like "why choose us" just above the footer on every single page
Hi Guys, I know that is not good having any kind of duplicate content on your site, but SEO is above all "competition", so I have to see what my competitor are doing to find the best way to outrank them. So this is my question: is it good or not having site wide content like "why choose us" just above the footer on every single page? At the moment, I can see many - too many - of my client competitors having the "Why choose us" as site wide content above the footer. The funny thing they don't use a couple of sentences, they have placed many words and 10/20 internal links, in other words, they have enough stuff to put down a stand alone page. What do you think: this is just a bad SEO practice or it may work, as I can see so many sites ranking well with this kind of piece of junk on each page. I am not going to recommend this to my client, but as am trying to detail every decision I make showing what the competitors are currently doing, my concern is that my client finds it and therefore will ask to have the same shiny piece of garbage above the footer. Thanks, Pierpaolo
On-Page Optimization | | madcow780 -
Properly changing title, URL and content for new keywords without harming other rankings.
Hello - We are looking to try to bring up some keywords in the SERPs that we are currently ranking fairly low for. We sell Christening clothing for children and people will use both Christening and Baptism to search for the same thing. We currently rank very high for Christening (#1 on Google for certain combinations) but we are fairly low on Baptism.
On-Page Optimization | | BabyBeauBelle
I am trying to figure out the best way to start getting Baptism up by changing some title, URL and content pages to include more Baptism keywords. My concern is messing with the existing because we rank so well for Christening. Since we are ecommerce we can vary this quite a bit on our products, but again I'm nervous to do so fearing changing the wrong things, too many products etc and in the process of trying to raise one set of keywords (baptism) we harm the other set (christening).
Any advice would be appreciated!0 -
Losing Page Rank after 301 redirect from http to www
Hi Guys I have site-wide redirected all http// to www and all the category pages lost their page ranks (except home page). I would like to know if this is normal and is it one of the possible causes in losing keyword ranking?
On-Page Optimization | | ilovebodykits0 -
The "100 links/page recommendation" - Do Duplicate Links Count?
We have way too many links on our homepage. The PageRank Link Juice Calculator (www.ecreativeim.com/pagerank-link-juice-calculator.php) counts them to 300. But all of them are not unique, that is some links point to the same URL. So my question: does the "100 links/page recommendation" refer to all anchors on the page or only to unique link target URLs? I know "100" is just a standard recommendation.
On-Page Optimization | | TalkInThePark0 -
How Pandas Define "Thin" content
Many websites like www.geico.com have little content on the homepage, but instead a ton of graphics. I've been told before to watch out for pages/posts less than 200 words, but 95% of websites have "main pages" that are graphically driven and have very very few words. So, if Panda is cracking down on thin content, how does Panda define "thin" with regards to major pages of a site? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | terran0 -
How do i chaneg a url without losing pre-existing linkjuice?
my client has a page on his site: www.revisitors.com/REF/TEST the page is for a free traffic offer...i have this page currently ranking 25th or so for "free traffic" - a great keyword to rank for to promote this offer with..... i want the url to be www.revisitors.com/free-traffic.html and then change the title tags to free traffic | free targeted traffic or something along those lines....i have hardly put in any linkbuilding work at all to get to 25 - it was a surprise but now that we are there i want to tighten things up and optimize as well as possible.... how do i do this without losing previously built linkjuice and without having a duplicate content issue for having both pages exist with a 301 redirect.... if i am wrong about something please dont hesitate to set me straight...i am only masquerading as an seo expert these days anyway.....thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | Ezpro90