Not sure which url to use for backlinks

[ithvac]

Hi our site, northamericahvac.com automatically goes to http://www.northamericahvac.com/servlet/StoreFront. There isnt anything I can do about it though, because we use prostores which limits things for us. That leads me to ask, when I'm making backlinks would I use northamericahvac.com www.northamericahvac,com, or http://www.northamericahvac.com/servlet/StoreFront.

[SebastianDyer]

Link to the most relevant part of the website, which may well be to the home page. If it is to the homepage, I'd suggest linking to www.northamericahvac.com and seeing if there is anything you can do to avoid the redirect.  Changing it will help your SEO in more ways than one - when people link to your homepage, it's not likely they'll link to the redirect and will just use the domain.  SEO aside, from a usability point of view, I think it needs to be fixed.

[webmethod]

This is the current flow of redirects:

1. northamericahvac.com -> (301) ->

2. www.northamericahvac.com -> (301) ->

3. http://www.northamericahvac.com/servlet/StoreFront

Assuming you can't fix the /storefront redirect, I would point the links to the www domain (number 2 URL) as that's your canonical domain (the non-www domain redirects to it). It's nicer to look at and there's less chance the URLs in backlinks will be spelt incorrectly than if you were linking to /storefront (number 3 URL). It's also likely to be the domain you will end up with once you fix the platform issue.

In practice I'm not sure it really matters which domain you point to, as your 301s are set up properly and your /storefront URL will be appearing in SERPs as it is. If you did migrate from the number 3 URL to the number 2 URL in future then you would have to set up a 301 in the reverse direction anyway.

George

@methodicalweb