WWW or No WWW: Which is Better for SEO?

 

“Should I use www or no www in my URLs?” is a question that I see almost daily from new webmasters in search engine optimization (SEO) forums around the Internet.  The same question gets posed many ways, but basically they want to know which version of their URL is best for SEO. 

So I thought I would take the time to answer it here to save myself a lot of typing in the future when responding to forum posts. Yeah. I am lazy… err… efficient like that!

Is using www or no www better for SEO?

The search engines do not care whether you use www or no www in URLs on your site.  There is nothing in their ranking algorithms that causes them to rank a www version of a URL higher than a non-www version of the same URL (or visa versa).   So the www and non-www are treated exactly the same by the search engines from a ranking perspective.

Whether you use www or no www to link to pages on your site is totally up to you.  It is based on your preference.  You can base your decision to use one or the other on what looks best on a business card, what rolls off the tongue better, or which version you think consumers will most likely remember.  It really doesn’t matter which you pick or why.

Personally, I always pick www versions over URLs with no www because I think consumers have grown to expect www in URLs.  Even though they likely type domain names into their browser address bar with no www more times than not, they expect to see the www version of domain names on business cards, advertisements, etc.

So why care about www vs. no www?

There is one major reason you should care about the use of www vs. no www in URLs.  As I said before, it doesn’t matter “which” you pick.  But it DOES matter that you pick one and stick with it because not doing so CAN affect your rankings.  Perhaps it sounds as though I just contradicted myself, but I did not.  Let me explain.

The search engines rank URLs.  They don’t rank web sites, and they don’t rank web pages.  They treat each unique URL as a different page in their index.  So they typically see http://google.com and http://www.google.com as two different pages and will rank them separately.

For example, if 10 sites link to my home page with http://google.com and 10 different sites link to my home page with http://www.google.com search engines will typically see this as two different pages, each with 10 inbound links.  This creates URL canonicalization issues which lead to duplicate content issues and split page rank/link juice.

Every page on your site should have a single URL used to refer to it called the canonical (preferred) URL.  All other non-canonical URLs that can be used to render that same page should be 301 redirected to the canonical URL.

In the above example, if I choose http://www.google.com as my canonical URL and 301 redirect http://google.com (the non-canonical version with no www) to the canonical URL, Google will now see my home page http://www.google.com as having 20 inbound links and the non-canonical http://google.com will be removed from their index.

Pick either the www or non-www version as your canonical URL

To sum things up… while URLs with www and without www are treated the same in the ranking algorithm, allowing pages on your site to be referenced both ways without 301 redirecting one of them to the other can hurt your rankings.