WWW vs. non-WWW: Which is Better for SEO?

Does using www vs. no www have an impact on your website's SEO? What do search engines prefer? Read on to find out.

How To Properly Set Up WWW or Non WWW At The DNS Level

WWW vs. No-WWW for SEO performance

Should you set your preferred domain to www. or non-www.? Is there a difference?

http://www.eversparkinteractive.com/

Should I use WWW or not? This is a question that often comes up at SEO conferences and forums. While it seems like an easy A or B answer, it is not. People often ask “What’s preferable: www- version or non-www version? Are they the same?”

In this video, Jason Hennessey, from EverSpark Interactive goes into detail on the different senerios and presents both the problems and solutions.

In SEO, this is also referred to as Canonicalization, which is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to the home page of a site.

For example, most would consider these urls the same:

www.domain.com

domain.com

www.domain.com/

domain.com/index

www.domain.com/home.asp

But technically speaking, all of these urls (or versions of your homepage) are different to Google. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls mentioned.

Also, since Google treats the www and non-www as different pages, there is also a risk of having a duplicate content problem which can cause your site to get algorithmically filtered in the search engine result pages (SERPS).

Therefore, you must canonicalize the situation and choose one url, then set that url as the preferred domain in your Google webmaster tools account.

Reference links include:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=e

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/canonicalization-seo-should-i-use-www-or-not/6950/

WWW vs non WWW and Which is Better For WordPress SEO

When setting up your site you may want to take a look at if you put WWW or not in your url. People often wonder if they should change their site url for better SEO. In this video, we will show you WWW vs non-WWW and which is better for SEO.

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Summary of this Tutorial:

When you have www. in front of a site, it acts like a hostname which can help with DNS flexibility and a few other things.

While non-www domains do not have that advantage.

In terms of SEO there is no advantage to use one over the other and showing one over the other is completely personal preference.

It is important to be consistent with how you show your site.

In Google Webmaster tools you can set your preference under site settings.

If you use SEO by Yoast it automatically sets canonical URLs in your header that tells Google your preference.