Setup WordPress with www in General -> Settings to get benefits of old links or does it matter?

[Tosten]

Hello,

I looked through many other Q&A and couldn't find this answer exactly... We build all of our client's sites on WordPress which automatically assign the new websites with no www. at the beginning. Recently one of our customers was upset because his new site (non-www) had only 3 links to it and his old www.domain.com site had 548. Is the simplest way to fix this to go into the WordPress Settings -> General and just change the WordPress Address and Site Address to the www version? Does it even matter or does WordPress tell Google to look at both versions. We don't see any SERP impact by having the non-www version up, but if it is an easy fix to get the 548 link credit I'll take it!

Reason I'm concerned is I do see the difference in OSE and would prefer to have 548 links vs. 3 also!

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks community!

[Tobiask-121573]

Hi,

I would change the Wordpress settings and setup a 301 redirect from non-www to www using htaccess (if you're using Apache, see e.g. http://enarion.net/web/htaccess/redirect-www-and-no-www/ for instructions how to do this). Updating the sitemaps file and resubmitting it to Google Webmasters, and manually fetching the www-version of the website with the Google crawler in the webmaster tools would be my next steps. Google and the other bots will use this signals to update their databases.

Best regards,
Tobias