Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Www vs non-www which is better?
-
Is it better to have all your pages point to the www version or non www version.
-
I am needing help with this same thing. Did you ever find a solution to redirecting with yahoo web hosting? TIA
-
Joel, i prefer www version cause i think from a technical perspective, there are several benefits to including the WWW.
- Ability to restrict cookies when using multiple subdomains. Cookies of a main domain (i.e. example.com) are sent to all subdomains: If you are going to have subdomains for other purposes (blog for instance), you may want to differentiate the sites and have a www prefix for the regular site.
- WWW actually MEANS something. As mentioned above, WWW is a hostname, and the hostname names the specific service being used a computer network; WWW names the web service for a domain.
- Using the WWW hostname allows for easy segregation in the file structure of your website. Everything in the “www” folder (and at the www.example.com domain) is directly related to serving the site to the public. This allows for simple root-level site organization, eg you could also have a dev folder and have a subdomain dev.example.com for your development site, etc.
- More flexibility with DNS. Your domain’s “Zone” file controls where traffic to your domain is directed and using the non-WWW version of your domain can complicate things.
you may still want to use the WWW simply because it’s conventional to do so. On a business card, the WWW clearly conveys, This is our address on the World Wide Web. People are used to looking for, and seeing, the WWW and that’s sufficient reason for many to stick to the convention
-
Personally, I'd dump yahoo hosting and have my stuff hosted elsewhere. For less than $40/mo you can get hosting and have access to edit the .htaccess file to your heart's content.
-
I spoke with Yahoo, apparently they only offer the 301 redirect for the higher cost hosting plans that run about $40. Any ideas?
-
-
Ok, does anyone know how to do a proper 301 redirect in yahoo web hosting?
-
As long as your consistent, but it just comes down to which have the higest ranksing if on an existing site.
I tend to prefer non-www for new sites as its less typing and un-necessary.
There is a moment for non-www http://no-www.org/
-
There is no better method they do not affect rankings, it is purely personal preference. However you must implement proper redirect rules to resolve http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com or vice versa which ever one you choose.
I tend to always go for www. as it just looks better to me.
-
I prefer www, because folks will generally tend to use that version when they link to you. It's reflex.
But you can check this. Run Open Site Explorer for both versions of your domain.
If more people link to you using 'www' than non-www, use www and 301 redirect the non-www to www.
If more people use non-www, do the reverse.
-
If you do choose to keep the www, make sure you have redirects in place so when a user doesn't enter the www, he or she will get to your home page. Just FYI, www.domain.com is a subdomain of domain.com, so if your site can be access through both, search engines view these as two different pages and possibly split rankings.
-
Neither one is better, but whichever one you choose, make sure you remain consistent for your entire site.
As for me, I use the www because that's what google uses.
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
-
Is Base64 encoding images in general better for SEO or worse?
We've made a lot of changes to our website (https://refreshcartridges.co.uk/) over the years, with our website developer putting a heavy emphasis on improving page loading times in general. One of the those changes has been to base64 encode or in-line the majority of images on our site which has reduced our loading times down to under a second for most of our pages for our visitors which are mainly based in the UK. My question is whether in-lining the images, thus removing the images filenames for index association results in this technique being a net-good or net-bad for our sites SEO in general, particularly on our frontpage.
Technical SEO | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Personalized Content Vs. Cloaking
Hi Moz Community, I have a question about personalization of content, can we serve personalized content without being penalized for serving different content to robots vs. users? If content starts in the same initial state for all users, including crawlers, is it safe to assume there should be no impact on SEO because personalization will not happen for anyone until there is some interaction? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Should we remove category paths for better SEO?
We're looking to build some serious content and capitalise on long-tail keyword traffic for our sub-category pages, example for targeted keyword "designer dining tables". Example of current link: www.website.com/designer-furniture/designer-dining-tables.html Would removing the category paths help? Example result - www.website.com/designer-dining-tables More user friendly URLs and better for SEO would you suggest? The only problem is, if we removed the paths would this have a hit on our traffic? Any advice would be much appreciated. We are using Magento platform.
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
DNS vs IIS redirection
I'm working on a project where a site has gone through a rebrand and is therefore also moving to a new domain name. Some pages have been merged on the new site so it's not a lift and shift job and so I'm writing up a redirect plan. Their IT dept have asked if we want redirects done by DNS redirect or IIS redirect. Which one will allow us to have redirects on a page level and not a domain level? I think IIS may be the right route but would love your thoughts on this please.
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Today1 -
Redirect non-www if using canonical url?
I have setup my website to use canonical urls on each page to point to the page i wish Google to refer to. At the moment, my non-www domain name is not redirected to www domain. Is this required if i have setup the canonical urls? This is the tag i have on my index.php page rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com.au" /> If i browse to http://mydomain.com.au should the link juice pass to http://www.armourbackups.com.au? Will this solve duplicate content problems? Thanks
Technical SEO | | blakadz0 -
Microsite on subdomain vs. subdirectory
Based on this post from 2009, it's recommended in most situations to set up a microsite as a subdirectory as opposed to a subdomain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites. The primary argument seems to be that the search engines view the subdomain as a separate entity from the domain and therefore, the subdomain doesn't benefit from any of the trust rank, quality scores, etc. Rand made a comment that seemed like the subdomain could SOMETIMES inherit some of these factors, but didn't expound on those instances. What determines whether the search engine will view your subdomain hosted microsite as part of the main domain vs. a completely separate site? I read it has to do with the interlinking between the two.
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0 -
Root vs. Index.html
Should I redirect index.html to "/" or vice versa? Which is better for duplicate content issues?
Technical SEO | | DavetheExterminator0
