Comments on: Canonicalization & SEO : Should I use WWW or not?

By: Tiyo Kamtiyono

Tiyo Kamtiyono — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:33:29 +0000

Cool article, really thanks. This encourage me to add a www prefix to my blog

By: Tiyo Kamtiyono

Tiyo Kamtiyono — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:33:29 +0000

Cool article, really thanks. This encourage me to add a www prefix to my blog

By: Lana Galileo

Lana Galileo — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:00:45 +0000

What about wordpress permalinks with friendly links, they just change original page to story, but old page is still active and accessible, its ok it redirects… but what if it dont redirects, i have some website where i cant redirect this mod rewritten links to new and im afraid im getting problems because of that… any ideas how to redirect dynamic links to static one?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:34:41 +0000

@Gama,

If you’re saying that a user can enter either http://www.domain.com or simply domain.com and arrive at the same place, then you may be right in most cases. But is has nothing whatsoever to do with the browser.

Where you end up when you type a URL is determined firstly by DNS and secondly by the site’s configuration. There are many examples where leaving the www off will take you to different content. That may not be advisable, but it *does* happen.

It will take users years to stop using www. Until they do, I suggest we continue to support it, but not encourage it. Redirect users behind the scenes to domain.com when they type in http://www.domain.com would be my advice.

By: Gama

Gama — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:58:28 +0000

Everybody will agree here that you can never duplicate domain names. Every domain is unique so why complicate things?

Try to type in your domain name witout “www” on any browsers and hit enter on your keyboard, you will understand what I’m saying.

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:32:27 +0000

Does this hurt your google rank if you have both www and non www links floating around?

By: Brad

Brad — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:16:08 +0000

Why can’t the big Kahuna’s of the Internet simply drop the www? If something has no value then eliminate it. I cannot see ,10 years from now, the use of WWW . So, you big honchos, get rid of it!

By: Rudy

Rudy — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:29:52 +0000

Look at this site, it uses www prefix.

I don’t think it’s going away any time soon.

By: Steve Penny

Steve Penny — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:02:13 +0000

I do SEO for some very large corporate websites and when I study the link architecture of links pointing to a site, I am seeing a strong trend in people simply dropping the www. when they make links to a site. The other trend is the increase in email addresses links which drop the www. Personally, I think someday the www. will look archaic. Until then, we live in confusing times regarding this issue and best defense is a 301 redirect to the version you prefer. GoogleBot doesn’t always get canonical issues right and when it doesn’t it splits your links… page rank leakage!

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:51:34 +0000

I’m with Kenny. The www subdomain is pointless. But I’m not about to stop supporting it. Allow people to type in www and then quietly redirect them to the proper domain, would be my advice.

And set the redirect up so that it works for the whole site, not just the homepage (i.e. http://www.domain.com/deep/link/ redirects to domain.com/deep/link).

It’s pretty easy to configure most website to do this either through code or through server configuration. It does seem noticeably to help with SEO too.