WordPress Sites: WWW vs. No WWW In Domain

[tvanslooten]

I bought a website that was HTML-based and the previous owner has 2,000+ backlinks pointing to the home page with all the backlinks using "www" in the domain (i.e. www.thedomain.com instead of http://thedomain.com).

I want to change the site from an HTML site to a WordPress site. Every WordPress site that I've owned has always been without www in the url and I'm not sure why that is. At any rate, how would I go about changing this site to a WordPress site while retaining the www in the domain? I don't want to lose all that backlink juice because the homepage of this site ranks very well for a few important keywords. Is there a way to "force" a WordPress site to use www in the urls?

Travis

[lockwood77]

You should be able to set the blog address in the General Settings area. You could also use the .htaccess file on your web server to create a 301 rewrite/redirect for http://website.com to http://www.website.com so that it appears correctly.

I would also look at creating 301 redirects for all the old URLs to the relevant new WordPress URLs, i.e. mapping the old page addresses to new ones, so you don't lose any links/bookmarks for old content pages.

[lockwood77]

Originally Posted by expertsinSEO

It will not make a big difference if you have W3 in your domain or not.

It will make a lot of difference if the www isn't 301'd to the non-www version and all the links end up pointing to a 404 error!