Www vs non-www which is better?
-
Is it better to have all your pages point to the www version or non www version.
-
I am needing help with this same thing. Did you ever find a solution to redirecting with yahoo web hosting? TIA
-
Joel, i prefer www version cause i think from a technical perspective, there are several benefits to including the WWW.
- Ability to restrict cookies when using multiple subdomains. Cookies of a main domain (i.e. example.com) are sent to all subdomains: If you are going to have subdomains for other purposes (blog for instance), you may want to differentiate the sites and have a www prefix for the regular site.
- WWW actually MEANS something. As mentioned above, WWW is a hostname, and the hostname names the specific service being used a computer network; WWW names the web service for a domain.
- Using the WWW hostname allows for easy segregation in the file structure of your website. Everything in the “www” folder (and at the www.example.com domain) is directly related to serving the site to the public. This allows for simple root-level site organization, eg you could also have a dev folder and have a subdomain dev.example.com for your development site, etc.
- More flexibility with DNS. Your domain’s “Zone” file controls where traffic to your domain is directed and using the non-WWW version of your domain can complicate things.
you may still want to use the WWW simply because it’s conventional to do so. On a business card, the WWW clearly conveys, This is our address on the World Wide Web. People are used to looking for, and seeing, the WWW and that’s sufficient reason for many to stick to the convention
-
Personally, I'd dump yahoo hosting and have my stuff hosted elsewhere. For less than $40/mo you can get hosting and have access to edit the .htaccess file to your heart's content.
-
I spoke with Yahoo, apparently they only offer the 301 redirect for the higher cost hosting plans that run about $40. Any ideas?
-
-
Ok, does anyone know how to do a proper 301 redirect in yahoo web hosting?
-
As long as your consistent, but it just comes down to which have the higest ranksing if on an existing site.
I tend to prefer non-www for new sites as its less typing and un-necessary.
There is a moment for non-www http://no-www.org/
-
There is no better method they do not affect rankings, it is purely personal preference. However you must implement proper redirect rules to resolve http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com or vice versa which ever one you choose.
I tend to always go for www. as it just looks better to me.
-
I prefer www, because folks will generally tend to use that version when they link to you. It's reflex.
But you can check this. Run Open Site Explorer for both versions of your domain.
If more people link to you using 'www' than non-www, use www and 301 redirect the non-www to www.
If more people use non-www, do the reverse.
-
If you do choose to keep the www, make sure you have redirects in place so when a user doesn't enter the www, he or she will get to your home page. Just FYI, www.domain.com is a subdomain of domain.com, so if your site can be access through both, search engines view these as two different pages and possibly split rankings.
-
Neither one is better, but whichever one you choose, make sure you remain consistent for your entire site.
As for me, I use the www because that's what google uses.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
New Magento store, is better to place it in a new url or it can work fine in a subdomain?
Hi friends, We are working on a new Magento store for one of our websites. Our strategy is for organic positioning of the products, so we need to understand if the Magento products will position better if the system is hosted in a subdomain of the main company domain or if it is better to host it under its own domain. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | FWC_SEO0 -
Spanish United States Vs Puerto Rico Hreflang
Hey Moz, So we are trying to figure out weather it is the same if we have Hreflang for "US-ES" vs "US-PR", IF we do "US-PR" for Puerto Rico for its own links we then have to create 3 parts to our site, PR Spanish PR English US Spanish We looked at Apple as an example and they had a "Latin America" for their Hreflang and labeled everything has either "es-419" is that the same concept as having just "us-es" for Puerto Rico? ( see attached screenshot ) We are trying to figure out what would be more effective and weather or not "US-ES" search results will appear for Puerto Rico also. PZVwg16
Technical SEO | | uBreakiFix0 -
Is repurposing an old sub domain better than creating a new sub domain?
We have a good sub domain like** art.ourwebsite.com** which currently sells custom canvas art. We have owned the domain since 2013 but it has only been live for the past few weeks. We want to redesign & repurpose the page to continue to sell custom canvas art but will eventually include other merchandise like mugs, tshirts, etc which wouldn't be custom. Would it be best to keep art.ourwebsite.com since is a shorter/more memorible & older sub domain or would it be best to update the name to something that encompasses our new products? Our marketing team has suggested yourart.ourwebsite.com
Technical SEO | | sb10301 -
Should i put an introduction on my site for better seo
Hi, my site is www.in2town.co.uk and we have been having serious problems with our site since our upgrade. Before the upgrade, our site was on the first page of google for many years and most of them we were in the top three, now however since the upgrade of our site we have had serious problems. The main keyword for our site was lifestyle magazine, but now after checking this keyword we are now on page 12, this has gone down over the past couple of days. we had an introduction and information about our magazine on the home page, trying to rank for the keyword lifestyle magazine, we were jumping from page nine to six to ten, we took the intro off as a developer said that we had done enough to rank well for the keyword without putting any text with the keyword on our site, but since taking it off, we have dropped down more in the rankings. I would love to hear from people on their thoughts on this and if we should put back the intro at the top or where they feel we should put it and should we put about the magazine at the bottom. I was always taught, if you want to rank well for a keyword then as well as doing all the linking, you also need to make sure you optimize the page with the keyword looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How best to deal with www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html
Firstly, this is for an .asp site - and all my usual ways of fixing this (e.g. via htaccess) don't seem to work. I'm working on a site which has www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html - both URL's resolve to the same page/content. If I simply drop a rel canonical into the page, will this solve my dupe content woes? The canonical tag would then appear in both www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html cases. If the above is Ok, which version should I be going with? - or - Thanks in advance folks,
Technical SEO | | Creatomatic
James @ Creatomatic0 -
When doing the ranking report I see my site showing up on google with out the www in front. So the report is not picking it up how do I fix that?
The ranking report is not picking up my site even though it's there. It would seem that the www. Is missing from the site on google so it's not registering in the report. How do i fix this?
Technical SEO | | ursalesguru0 -
Rel=Canonical, WWW vs non WWW and SEO
Okay so I'm a bit of a loss here. For what ever reason just about every single Wordpress site I has will turn www.mysite.com into mysite.com in the browser bar. I assume this is the rel=canonical tag at work, there are no 301s on my site. When I use the Open Site Explorer and type in www.mysite.com it shows a domain authority of around 40 and a few hundred backlinks... and then I get the message. Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to XXXXXX. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>? So if I click to see this data instead I have less than half of that domain authority and about 2 backlinks. *** Does this make a difference SEO wise? Should my non WWW be redirecting to my WWW instead because that's where the domain authority and backlinks are? Why am I getting two different domain authority and backlink counts if they are essentially the same? Or am I wrong and all that link juice and authority passes just the same?
Technical SEO | | twilightofidols0 -
Internal vs external blog and best way to set up
I have a client that has two domians registered - one uses www.keywordaustralia.com the other uses www.keywordaelaide.com He had already bought and used the first domain when he came to me I suggested the second as being worth buying as going for a more local keyword would be more appropriate. Now I have suggested to him that a blog would be a worthy use of the second domain and a way to build links to his site - however I am reading that as all links will be from the same site it wont be worth much in the long run and an internal blog is better as it means updated content on his site. should i use the second domain for blog, or just 301 the second domain to his first domain. Or is it viable to use the second domain as the blog and just set up an rss feed on his page ? Is there a way to have the second domain somehow 'linked' to his first domain with the blog so that google sees them as connected ? NOOBIE o_0
Technical SEO | | mamacassi0