With or without the "www." ?

[Optimise]

Is there any benefit whatsoever to having the www. in the URL?

My domain is quite long therefore I've not been using the www. however a few people have mentioned it's good practice to include it.

The www. forwards to the main URL (non www.) and I've set my preferred domain name in webmaster tools to the non www.  so I'm thinking that should all be ok.

Just hoping I could get  some of the experts views to make sure this is all ok.  The site is a year old and I'm just starting to really get going on the link building so it's not too late to change if I'm wrong.

If others link to my site and include the www. will the link juice be passed, as I suspect many will include it without any thought?

[AlanMosley]

There is no reason to have a www, i dont have one on any of my domains, and recomend against it for my clients.

Imagine if people were call me www.alan, it would be stupid, so why call your web site www.domain.com

I believe this is a leftover from old unix servers, it is not needed today.

[BryanCasson]

I always use non-www, as it makes my domain name shorter. So long as you choose what your preference is in webmaster tools and 301 redirect the www to the non-www (like you did) then you will have no problems from Google.

The links to your website containing www. will not affect your link juice at all.

[AlanMosley]

I would not say not at all, they will lose a little as 301's leak link juice, they do not apss it all.

But either way you can have that problem.

[BryanCasson]

Google has changed their approach on this and now see www and non-www as the same (they do not even count it as a redirect anymore) googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html

[blacey]

Personally I think the non-www vs www seems a bit pointless, people very rarely type in the domain name into the address bar and even if they do type it without www. there will be a redirect in place to add that in for them.

In terms of search engines and the SERP page then yes it may look cleaner, but the end visitor isn't going to sit there and think, "oh this site isn't using www, i'll go to that site instead".

Its all down to personal preference but I would suggest leaving it is www.domain.com as this is what the majority of site seem to do (even SEOMoz!)

[Maximise]

I think many people have misinterpreted this article. They say that they have changed the way they categorise links in Webmaster Tools, it does not mention any change in the algorithm. Many comments on the article asked for clarification on this and here is the response:

"Re: all the search algorithm- and ranking-related questions: This update only changes how links are displayed in Webmaster Tools. It doesn't affect how links are valued in relation to the search algorithm or ranking. It has nothing to do with Panda, nothing to do with keywords, nothing to do with PageRank."

So you should still leak a bit of link juice from a 301.

[blacey]

In the grand scheme of things I don't see it being a big issue as Google's recent updates to the algorithm are targeted at over optimisation of content and weeding out poor quality pages from the SERP.

My point being that from an SEO perspective there are more important things to concern yourself with to ensure your website is ranking highly in Google for your chosen set of keywords.

[Optimise]

Thanks for all of the replies, much appreciated.  I think I shall leave it as it is as there doesn't appear to be any merit to moving across to the www. apart from the very small loss of link juice when people link to the www. and it gets 301'd.

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

If I remember there /was/ a good reason one way or the other for using cookieless domains and such to optimise image delivery e.t.c., it can only be done with your website on one and images on the other, but I can not remember which was around it was, and what  senerio brings it about at the moment.

I prefur the www. version mostly due to all our competitors using it, so we look 'odd' when next to them. People expect to see the www.

[AlanMosley]

The article does not mention redirects, 301 redirects leak link juice, both google and bing have confirmed that, .

The article is how GWMT counts internal links, even if google search algorithm saw www and non www as internal, it would still see them as 2 different pages, and it would still not pass all link juice on a redirect, as it does not matter if the link is external or internal, all 301 redirects leak link juice.

[AlanMosley]

I agree it is not a big thing, but i cant agree on doing so because a majority of sites do it.

The resson i dont use www, is that it is un-necessary, i cant see any argument for it.

[AlanMosley]

I think if you go back a few years, people did expect to see a www, i think that is less so today, and even less so in the future.

but it is a small point really, the main thing is once you have made your decision, make sure you get your redirects and internal linking correct.

[blacey]

Yeah that's fair enough but like I said it's not a deal breaker and there are more important things to spend time changing to benefit your site for search engines. I live by the rule, "If its not broke, don't fix it", until search engines decide that non-www is "better" or they decide to put more weighting on non-www domains then there is no point worrying about it.

[AlanMosley]

agreed

[Vinnie]

Recently we were faced with the same issue on behalf of a client. I made the decision to retain the www. My reasoning was based that this client had been live with their website since 1998 and had amassed literally thousands of backlinks all pointing to the www of his website.  In my mind keeping his URL structure was more important than shortening a URL. His backlinks spoke volumes for his past success.

I am also of the opinion that a majority of end users will still type into a search www as prefix before the domain name. With that in mind it makes feel that they would also automatically type ‘www’ as a prefix when linking back to a site.

So, strictly from an SEO point of view I woudl use WWW.

[AlanMosley]

i think more would leave the www off when typing, but thats just my opinion. but more to the point i think more will leave it off as time goes on.

to make myself clearer, i think every day more and moe people realize it is un-necessary

of cause in your example i would leave it on.

in fact if a site had 11 links to www and 10 links to non www, i would leave it on, but if it had 10 each way, they i would leave it off as my preference. links is much more important

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

One other way of looking at this, especaly if you have a short domain is that a shorter url uses up less of character limits on social sites, forum sigs, or any other senario where you might otherwise have to use a url shortener to post the link.

It's a slight benifit, but it may mean the diffrence between sharing yourname.com or goog.gl/code, the former of which is usualy prefurable for brand reconition at least.

[AlanMosley]

small but good point

[blacey]

Deviating slightly on the top here but I would say that link inclusion on social sites you should use services like bit.ly and not paste in the URL.

My reasoning for this is what with a bit.ly url if you add a + at the end you can see statistics for that particular link (how many clicks its had etc), which is nice and simple and saves crawling through Google Analytics to answer some simple fundamental questions.

In email signatures, leaflets and printed promotional material (where your typically short on space to use) then I agree it does make things shorter and look nicer, and who know maybe it will catch on and more and more people will start removing www. from their domains and it will then become more of a standard, for which Google and other search engines will probably use as a possible ranking factor.

I must admit this has been a great discussion on this topic.