www or no www for SEO
I was over at the Search Engine Guide today reading a new post where they brought up a really good point many people over look with their websites.
Do you use http://yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com/home.html?
Actually many people use both and do not even realized that it will hurt their SEO efforts.
Those urls above may seem like they are the same page, but to a search engine they are actually different pages. Even though they all may access your main page, they are considered different.
You may not think it is a big deal, but it is! If people access your website with and without the www, search engines may index both versions and you could be penalized for duplicate content. The search engines could also pick one version to rank and drop all others for duplicate content.
Also, any links pointing to your domain should be checked to make sure they all use the same address. This way your page rank and link juice can all be allocated to one page and not divided.
This blog uses http://thewahmblog.com, however I have found people linking to the site with www in the url. When that happens I generally ask them to please correct it and remove the url to alleviate any confusion for seo purposes.
I did not use the www for a few reasons…
- It is shorter to use.
- WordPress installs automatically on non www and is configured on non www. Instead of changing it, I left it alone. Ok I admit, I was being lazy and did not feel like configuring it.
Now, I have run into the issue that many people automatically add www, and when they do that it does make the search engines look at the blog as a different page.
Google currently only has http://thewahmblog.com indexed.
So, I would advise you select which version you want top use for your website address and stick to it. Make sure you use the same address in all marketing efforts on and offline.
What do you use for your website? Have you ever checked to see if you had more than one version indexed by the search engines?
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May 15th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
interesting info, i was unaware of that. that’ s something that i will have to check into and decide which way to go.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
I went back and forth over this, too, and ended up going with the http://www. I think I have it fixed with a redirect to make sure it doesn’t matter.
I find it interesting that my reseller account on Hostgator doesn’t want me to enter the preceeding www for any of the new sites/accounts I create. Wonder if we’ll ever just drop the www for most purposes.
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May 16th, 2008 at 11:04 am
I have always used http://www.mysite.com/ when ever referring to my website.
I never put a filename after the trailing slash unless it’s a specific webpage. The reason for that is so that I don’t get caught with pages not found if I change the default extender. Example: I went from index.htm to index.html to index.php and each time I ended up with pages not found in the search engines.
I go into each of my wordpress blogs when I create them and set them to www
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May 16th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Clerical Business Solutions »
I noticed you used clericalsolutionsinc.net/default.aspx as your default URL. If you ever change that, you will have allot of incoming links that will need correcting, or you will end up with allot of 404 errors.
You would be better off just linking to the domain with no extension, since it will direct to the default page any way.
May 16th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
James Mann »
On every website I own with the exception of this blog, I use www on. This blog however, was never configured for default www links, and I decided not to change it since I had so many pages indexed within the first few days of launching.
Every blog I have set up since this one, I have changed the config file to www not just http://