Cons Of Non-www Domain

[ktaylor310]

I am reviewing a site for a potential client and noticed that his entire site has been spidered by Google as http://domainname instead of www.domainname. I know that this is not preferred by most people because other sites tend to automatically link to www.domainname, but what are the other cons? Any SEO implications? Is it worth doing a 301 redirect?

[Karri]

Hey Kim,

My understanding is that it's ideal if you can have the majority of links pointing to one version or the other (i.e. www or non-www domain). Otherwise, you're dividing up votes for what is actually the same page. (Does anyone get what I mean there? lol).

Here is an article I just bookmarked a few days ago that might help: http://janeandrobot.com/library/domain-canonicalization

Now, can you say "cononicalization" 5 times fast?

Cheers,
Karri

[ktaylor310]

I can't even say it once really fast Thanks for the article!

[Bestone]

yeah Karri i do agree with you.

[AirForce1]

In my own experiences, domain with or without www prefix would not affect SEO efforts. But it is important that you should just use one form of your domain in building backlinks and use 301 redirect in your .htaccess file.

[therawdata]

I am just now beginning to experiment with this myself. Seems that it depends more on how you build your backlinks. For example, when using your anchor in html like

<a href="http://yourdomain.com">Anchor Text</a>

it is different than

<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com">Anchor Text</a>

I prefer to use non www in my domain in case, when building my back links, there are any text limit restrictions i'm not eating up characters on "www." (it eliminates 4 characters per address.

I also do this consistently across the board, so I know that any place I'm doing a backlink that I shouldn't use www.

*Also* If you use Google Webmaster Tools, you can specify which one you want to use, either www or non-www

Good luck!

[rfresh]

Most people don't know that the "www" part of a domain name is actually a sub-domain name, which means that it makes it a very different domain name. So yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com are two very different domain names. Sub-domains are useful when a business needs to separate a certain function of their website business. Like sending people to sales.yourdomain.com or to support.yourdomain.com for those functions. So, it would not make any sense at all to sub-domain out your domain name in one case and not others.

In other words, you wouldn't use support.yourdomain.com to SEO at Yahoo and then use yourdomain.com to SEO at Google. Use www in all cases.

You need to pick one and stick with it and never use one or the other. www is the preferred string because everyone (well almost everyone) uses it. So just get into the habit of using it for everything you use your domain name for.

[plusplustutor]

No effect on any major search engine. And non-major search engines don't really matter.

[dorothykinder]

Hi,
I recommend you to use only a single domain as its not a big problem if you use www or non www since its only the back links may be directed to any of these.