importance of submitting to engines WITH www. on URL

how important is the "www" in the URL?

[seminole]

Hello,

I was analysing competing websites the other day and realized that I was the only webmaster who was NOT submitting to engines with a "www" in the URL. Most servers these days do not require a www in your URL. To me it seems useless and I always try to eliminate it from my URL(s) in kinks, submissions etc.

Is this a handicap to my SEO ranking? I did pick up an error from a third rate engine once that it was requiring the "www" or wouldn't index. How common is that?

I'm not sure if it matters, but, I am considering beginning to submit WITH the www from now on? Any opinions on that? Is it important, or just a coincidence that atleast 9 of 10 top competitors in google have www?

[graeme_p]

I agree with you - after all we do not use mail. in our email addresses.

There is one reason to use www, which is that users expect it: trying giving someone a url verbally without the www and watch what they actually type. This problem can be dealt with by a redirect.

AS far as search engines go, the main this is to be consistent, and to ensure that the non-canonical version in redirected.

I have not come across a SE that requires www to index - there are some very big sites they will not be able to index, including parts of Yahoo.

[seminole]

Yes, my sites do not require the WWW and all domains I have work same with or without it. I wonder if the SE algorithms count the lack of WWW against me?

At any rate, I find that not submitting with the WWW for the SE submission, I must be in a dramatic minority.. But, I do have a number one position site in Google that has no WWW... However, same site in other engines is not ranked as high. I am trying to figure out why that is, and how to get 1st spot in the other engines. I may be grasping at straws.

[graeme_p]

all domains I have work same with or without it

This could be the problem.

If you have a site that works the same with or without a SE could see it as two sites - so you may not get credit for all incoming links, you may get some sort of dupe content penalty.

What I do is 301 redirect www.mydomain.com to mydomain.com

[seminole]

I tried that redirect before and it caused an error? It saw that as a redirect to the same address I think, I'll try again and see.

However, if you did this, you would need to redirect ALL uses of the WWW.MYDOMAIN.COM/XXX not just the root home page. I have a site up for 4 years and it has both WWW and non WWW URLs indexed all over the place. Although I ALWAYS use NO WWW in my links and submissions, somehow I wind up indexed with WWW sporadically, I guess by followed inbound links, not of my creation. How could that be done where the htaccess would replace

WWW.MYDOMAIN.COM/AnyGivenPage.html

with

MYDOMAIN.COM/AnyGivenPage.html

I don't think I know how to articulate that to htaccess so that it would over time fix ALL USE of the WWW one way or the other.

[caveman]

seminole, my guess is that you're almost certainly being negatively affected in the SERP's at one or more SE's by virtue of providing duplicate www sites for each of your non-www sites. This can easily trigger dup content problems with the SE's.

So:

1) Decide whether you prefer the www or non-www version of your site, pick one and stick with it in all matters related to linking, internal and external. Personally, I prefer www url's mainly for the reason that graeme_p posted above. People tend to think that sites are www sites, and so often when linking to a site they will include the www. That sends bots to the www site and even if you have no internal pages linked to www URL's, they'll get indexed if this issue has been not handled properly. And if you have handled the redirections properly and the links are going to a non-www site, then inbound links to a www address will be 301/permanently redirected to the non-www version of the page. There is IMO some slippage of PR as a result of this process, unfortunately, because at times the SE's don't always get 301's right. Generally though it works fine, and passes PR thru to the desired target page.

2) Once you've picked the format you like make sure that ALL of your internal site links use that format. Be consistent throughout the site.

3) Head over to the Apache Web Server Forum [webmasterworld.com] once you've got straight how you want to proceed, and get specific advice on redirecting all of your www pages to non-www pages, or the other way around, whichever you choose. There are a lot of variations on how redirections can be handled, but redirecting all non-www URL's to www or the other way around, within a single domain, is relatively straightforward.

4) After steps 1, 2, and 3, hunt down external links to your site that are in the other format, and try to get them to change their links to the finalized format. This is not essential, but it can't hurt and will probably help a bit. At the very least it will stop sending bots to a site that no longer exists.

Hope that helps.

[chamco]

This is a very interesting point that I never thought of...thank you!
I'll try and see if it helps me.