Link With Or Without "www."

[sfoley]

Hiya

Should you in general submit links to your site as "http://www.example.com" or "http://example.com" (assuming you have no dedicated www-server)?

Without the www the url is shorter, but with www there is more "familiarity". Besides, most mail programs will render the text "www.example.com" as a link.

My site automatically forwards the user to a country-specific subdomain anyway, ("http://uk.bountybox.net", "http://au.bountybox.net" ... and so on), so the user will never see the www.

Any best practices?


Cheers,
Steffen

[prasunsen]

It doesn't really matter, but make both www and non-www work with the one of them making 301 redirect to the other. So you don't spread PR between the two

[Sesimi]

having both www and non-www working = duplicate content = poor rankings.
Your hosted on an Apache server, update your .htaccess file to do the 301 redirect. Also get a dedicated IP address.

[cpr]

Any idea how to do this on yahoo's hosting?

[greg1343]

Yahoo doesn't allow you to upload an htaccess file. They want you to redirect with meta tags. Which is not the same as a 301.

It's best to pick one style and stick with it. Google will consider each a different page. However, their webmaster tools allows you to select a preferred name.

[onlinebillb]

I always do a redirect in my .htaccess file from a non-www to a www, it's a standard practice for any new site that I create. I also use .htaccess to rename all .php files to .html files, etc, to optimize the pages for search engines (these two things alone help improve rankings greatly, and fast at that).

[bhartzer]

prasunsen is right, it doesn't matter which one you choose, as long as you choose one or the other.

My site automatically forwards the user to a country-specific subdomain anyway

But, when the search engines come crawling, which page do you forward them to?

[Promotif]

If you continue to use yahoo as your host just make sure that the links on your pages all point to the same version, either non-www or www. This will help the search engines know which version of the site you prefer them to spider.