Www. or not?

[salvyy]

Hi,

I am pretty new to SEO. I know I have made so many mistakes and I am trying to learn now here on SEOmoz. At this moment, I am trying to find the answer to a situation that puzzles me. Since English is not my native language, I will do my best to be clear. I hope that a seasoned SEO expert out there can help me with this.

I have a website (http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com) that in the very beginning I optimized for the URL http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com. I was even able to list this URL into the DMOZ directory. The problem is that after a while the web hosting company I use - I don't know why yet - decided to make my site available as http://pokeronlineitalia.com. This means that if a person types in http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com, she gets redirected to http://pokeronlineitalia.com (the traditional URL without the "www"). Since when I started the site I was even more clueless than I am now about SEO, I thought that that would not make any difference. Even the guy at the web hosting company told me that that would be ok in terms of SEO. I thought that that was the case and closed an eye. The fact is that now I am using several tools to measure the strength of my site in the eyes of the search engines and noticed that http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com seems stronger. Using a the tool I cannot mention, I compared the two URL and found out this:

The total number of unique domains with backlinks pointing to a specific page is:

137 for the site WITHOUT the "www" and 2,210 for the site WITH the "www"

The total number of links pointing to a specific URL is:

864 for the site WITHOUT the "www"; and 61,871 for the site WITH the "www"

The number of domain backlinks is:

66,928 for the site WITHOUT the "www"; and 61,892 for the site WITH the "www"

Moreover, as I have said, http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com is listed in DMOZ while the site without the "www" is not.

My questions are the following:

Is the site WITH the "www" in the URL stronger than the site WITHOUT the "www"? If so, can the guys at the web hosting company fix the issue and make sure that a person can go straight to http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com without being redirected to the site without the "www"? Finally, if the issue gets fixed, will the site with the "www" be indexed normally by the search engines? I have noticed that pages in the site with the "www" do not get indexed. Is it bad in the eyes of the search engines to go back to http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com? What would you do?

I would really appreciate the opinion of an expert on this issue. Thank you for reading such incredibly long question.

All the best,

• Mark

[AlanMosley]

I myself like to use the non www, but in your case you are right your www version is stronger.
What is happening at the moment is that the links pointing to the www version are still giving your site credit, but when the are 301 redirected they lose a bit of link juice between 5 to 15%. That is not much but seeing how many links you have that adds up to a lot.
All you need to do is 301 redirect the other way to the www. This will confuse the search engines for a few weeks but will sort itself out.

[Spleen]

www version is not stronger in the first place, but when the two versions exist, it creates duplicate content and one of them finally become stronger because Google chose it as the canonical one.

Now you have to make 301 redirections, and I suggest you to redirect to the www version because in your case  this is the strongest one and because www version is generally preferred for communication purpose.

Hope it helps )

[salvyy]

Hi,

Thank you for the reply. I appreciate it.

All best.

[salvyy]

Hi,

Thank you for explaining the situation. I will contact my web hosting company and will ask them to make the change.

Best regards.

[salvyy]

Hi Alan,

Can you please tell me if I need to do the redirect in file "robots.txt"? Do you know the 301 code to edit?

Thank you.

[AlanMosley]

no. not robots.txt

Your site is on apache, you need to do your redirects in your .htaccess file

[salvyy]

Thank you again.

I let the guys at the web hosting company do the redirect.

All the best.