What Domain Name Works Better?

With WWW or Without WWW?

[webgaya]

I found that many searches I
did for back links and indexed
pages brought more results for
the domain name that "doesn't"
include www.

As I know using www infront of
a domain name is just a convention
and some may have it or not or
some have both.

So, for my searches, what is best to
use? With www or without www?

If a web site has a different host name
like "mail" in mail.example.com
does searching for just example.com
include results relating to mail.example.com?

[rkhare]

hmmm interesting observation. and i always thought that www was better, now may have to change my view

[jdMorgan]

Non-www is better, as stated in this case, if you search for the domain name using an unquoted string. No real advantage when searching for keywords, though.

www, mail, test, search, members, and anything else are all just possible subdomains of example.com. Search engines don't care one way or the other. If they find a link, it's a link.

But be aware that most people are used to typing-in "www" and ".com," and therefore, www.example.com is best if you expect a lot of type-in traffic. Of course, whichever you use (www or non-www), you should set up a 301 redirect from all accessible non-canonical (sub)domains to the canonical domain before taking the site live. That'll go a long way toward preventing people from linking to the 'wrong' version, and avoiding duplicate-content problems.

Jim