Remove "www" out of Domain Name. Bad SEO?

non www,google seo,htaccess,apache,seo

[Giancarlo]

The example website ex. domainexample.com has many backlinks to the www version (http://www.domainexample.com/).

Google has more pages indexed of the non www domain (see below) 102 to 91.

If I were to write up an htaccess file to strip the www out of the domain will this be considered bad seo?

I heard that a www version of your site an a non www version of your site are basically two different websites to search engines. So I would not like to split up the websites pagerank therefore I would force one version to everyone.

Will I lose the backlink authority from the links pointing to the www version? I plan on setting the 301 flags on with the htaccess file.

If I do this will the current rankings drop?


site:domainexample.com
Results 1 - 10 of about 102 from domainexample.com. (0.59 seconds)

site:www.domainexample.com
Results 1 - 10 of about 91 from www.domainexample.com. (0.34 seconds)

[g1smd]

Faced with this dilemma a few months ago for a site already online for six months, I chose to go with the one with the most incoming external links.

That was the

www

version. It took Google several months to straighten everything out.

There's advantages in using

www

for the site. The

[site:www.domain.com]

and

[site:domain.com -inurl:www]

searches should show all and no pages respectively.

Even though the site might use

www.example.com

URLs, you can still brand it as

example.com

- I'll bet you don't type

www.google.com

into your browser - look what happens when you type just

google.com

in.

Yep. It redirects.


By the way,

[site:example.com]

lists both

www

and

non-www

URLs. You need to use

[site:example.com -inurl:www]

to see only the

non-www

listings.

Register and verify both www and non-www in Google WebmasterTools and look at BOTH reports, especially those for 'internal links' and 'links from other sites'.