Domain with or without "www"

[netbuilder]

Does it influence the search engine result if we have our domain name without the "www." ?

[dignan99]

I don't believe it does, but I do try to stay consistent in my citations, listings, and links.  I prefer www, but to each their own.

[ShaMenz]

Hi,

Effectively it is your choice, but once you have chosen you should be consistent.

There are some things to take into consideration before you make your choice.

Cyrus gave a good explanation of this in Whiteboard Friday a while ago. Definitely worth a look.

Have a great day

Sha

[RyanKent]

It definitely does not influence search engine results in any way whether you use www or not. It is purely a matter of preference.

One consideration you may wish to factor into your decisions is links.

A shorter URL allows for easier link sharing. If you do not use www, then you are saving 4 characters (www.) which makes your links smaller.

But...most software will recognize any word beginning with "www." as a link and convert it into a hyperlink. So www.mydomain.com would be a hyperlink, but mydomain.com would not be a link. You would need to use http:// in addition to mydomain.com to make the hyperlink. Then again, some software still doesn't convert based on the "www' so you would need to entire http://www.mydomain.com.

I probably crossed the line into giving too much information. We live in a world of tweets and friendly URLs so I thought it was worth mentioning.