URL Canonicalization? www vs. non-www issues

[surenot]

When I lunched my website I choose URL without WWW in it thinking that will make it more user friendly but just learned it's not actually very SEO friendly. It seems that Google likes URLs with WWW.

My website is a forum that have thousands of pages indexed and they are rank pretty good but not the homepage!

I would like to redirect all URLs without www to www but not sure if that will actually do more harm than good?

All my backlinks and internal links are non-www!

Please give me some advise?

[lucy24]

It seems that Google likes URLs with WWW.

"Quick Reply:" nonsense.

[phranque]

the www. in the host name in and of itself will not help nor hurt your SEO efforts.

[ZydoSEO]

It doesn't matter whether you choose the www or non-www form of the site's URLs as the canonical (preferred) form. It is simply a matter of YOUR preference. The engines have no preference.

What is important is that you pick one as the canonical form and 301 redirect all page requests for the non-canonical form to the corresponding canonical form.

[surenot]

Thank god I ask the question here first as I was about to really mess things up :)
Thank you so much.

[samwest]

try: <snip>

<replaced with>
http://freetools.webmasterworld.com/tools/header-checker-tool/ [freetools.webmasterworld.com]
or http://freetools.webmasterworld.com/tools/fetch-header/ [freetools.webmasterworld.com]
</replaced with>

If you get more than one 200 response, you have bigger problems. Redirect ALL to your desired URL.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 5:16 pm (utc) on Nov 5, 2014]
[edit reason] Plese no external tools as per Charter (replaced with WebmasterWorld tool) [/edit]

[rvkumarweb]

Hi Surenot,

As ZydoSEO says, Search engines never preferred domains. We have to select which one is good and which one is not. Do you know why people are going with "www" because its proper structure and looks good. Always people preferred to go with "www". If you fix the duplicate domain , kindly go with redirection stuff don't use canonical tags on the duplicate pages.

Reason:
If you have dynamic sitemap.xml file then you will get automatic duplicate URL in that tool, Sometimes you may also add the duplicate URL in static sitemap by mistake. In order to avoid, go with 301 redirection.

Eg: Which I preferred.

www.xyz.com
www.xyz.com/
www.xyz.com/index.php
www.xyz.com/index.html

are 301 redirected to xyz.com

Let me know if you have any doubt on this!

[lucy24]

www.xyz.com
www.xyz.com/

These are the same URL. The slash after the domain name when nothing else follows is supplied-- or omitted-- by the browser and has no effect on the request seen by the server.

[rvkumarweb]

Thanks for quick respond Lucy24. Now I got the difference between with and without (/).

[SnowLeppard]

The slash after the domain name when nothing else follows is supplied-- or omitted-- by the browser and has no effect on the request seen by the server.

..this could depend on your .htaccess file

[lucy24]

No. It couldn't. This is not about final slashes in general, or about present or absent index.html. It is about the specific case of
example.com
vs.
example.com/
The server does not see this slash.

[sett]

Ranking of internal pages of forum matters a lot as compare to home page. You shouldn't be much worried about home page ranking.