Do I need to use www for SEO?

[lucasdean123]

I have come here to clear my doubt. I am stuck with a thought related to SEO. Can anyone tell me whether I need to add ‘www’ in my URL for best SEO results? Does it play an important when I am SEOing? What if my domain name is without ‘www’? I was told by my friend that the site will automatically get transformed from no-www to www with the help of htaccess. If this is the case, then why is ‘www’ recommended? I need your viewpoints as soon as possible because my site doesn’t have ‘www’ included. Thanks!

[Rastet123]

It doesn’t matter at all to your SEO in Google, Bing or Yahoo whether you use www in your domain name or not.
Search engines most likely don’t consider that as a ranking factor, because it has no value in improving the relevance of their search results or improving the user experience. There is one exceptional point, however. You don’t want to use both a www version of the site and a non-www version.

If you do use both www and non-www, then you’ll have duplicate content problems, also known as “canonicalization” problems.

(The word “canon” is used in religious terms to mean the “official set of holy writings.” That’s been adapted to other fields. So you can have the canonical set of Harry Potter books, which are the official books, and you can have the “canonical” version of a web page, which is the official one you want search engines to rank in their search results.)

What I mean is that if you have two identical versions of a page, one found at http://www.example.com and another found at http://example.com, and both show up fine to search engine spiders, you will have duplicate content.

This is problematic because a) It confuses search engines as to what is the canonical, or official, page. b) You will sometimes get links to one version and sometimes to another, such that you compete with yourself.

How do you do SEO successfully then, if you currently have such www vs non-www duplicate content problems?
You have two options.

1) Redirect either version to the other one using “301 permanent” redirects. There are numerous tutorials on this online, for DIY people, but you can also get a decent freelance programmer to do it for you. Personally, I get my hosting from Dreamhost and they give you an option to 301 redirect one version to the other.

I have a $50 off discount code at Dreamhost off any annual hosting package (or a $25 off discount on a monthly hosting package) if you need to set up a new site: Just enter GabSavesYou50 when you sign up for Dreamhost hosting.

(Full disclosure: It’s an affiliate link, but I’d endorse Dreamhost personally anyways, as I have in the past. Their tech support is super responsive and they have numerous tools to make things very easy, like one-click WordPress installs.)

2) Use the “canonical” tag to indicate to search engines which version is the official one. For those of you using WordPress, Yoast has a plugin to automate some canonicalization, but I’m not sure it’s applicable to this situation.

(3) Update: Malcolm Coles has a related article with examples of www vs non www that’s a valuable read on this topic.

[Ian Walker]

Using www or non-www does not affect SEO results. You can have as of your choice. Say,if ur website have www version, you can redirect non-www version to www version that avoids duplicate content.

[kinah1]

I need your viewpoints as soon as possible because my site doesn’t have ‘www’ included.

[TommySEO]

You can use the Google option in webmaster tools - choose www or non www. Before this setting you must change your .htaccess file and to perform the redirect 301 from one to another version. If you not perform well this thing, you can have internal duplicated content and could be penalized.

[scours]

It is quite so. Your rankings will not be affected in any way, so choose the one you like more. Just make sure to redirect users to the proper version (do not keep both www and non www).

[john smith1]

Thanks for sharing this useful information on cananical issues