What is the importance of "www" in your domain?

[amritvirdi1987]

Hi there,

I've been doing IM for about 2 months now, just built a site and have been regularly backlinking to it.

Today I was browsing some of the packages on Fiverr and found a guy who will set up a few backlinks. I bought his service based on the positive reviews, and after you pay, it says "the seller would like some additional information from you before he/she gets started"..

The sentence read:


"All I need from you is your site url and an anchor keyword or phrase. Please ensure you get the www prefix correct, by this I mean ensure you're certain whether you want it to be www or no www.
Also please ensure that you consider slash canonicalisation, (trailing slash/no trailing slash)"


Now, I'm pretty sure that when my site shows up in Google, it always shows up without the "www" prefix, so should I give it without? What is the importance of this?



Also, what's the relevance of the slash/no trailing slash? :S


Majorly confused guys. I think my last 2 months of backlinking have been pretty much a waste if the www is such a big deal - as I've always used it.


Thanks in advance guys

[James-]

don't quote me on this, but basically links to http://www.site.com and http://site.com are 'kind of' seen as different urls to the search engines i think.

either way, you want to stick with one and tell google in webmaster tools which your preferred domain is for the best seo benefit

[amritvirdi1987]

I've submitted it with a www prefix to webmaster tools.. :O

[MaverickUK]

You either want http://site.com or http://www.site.com - whichever is the path to your domain, give him that. Let's say you visit your site using http://site.com, does it re-direct you to http://www.site.com or not? If it doesn't redirect, give 'em the link without the www.

[jthenry55]

I'm wondering the same thing. My site has no www. in the url however if you put the www in it will still bring you to my homepage. Why is this and is it better one way or the other?

[MaverickUK]

Ah. Forget what i said about if http://site.com re-directs you to http://www. as a means of testing as i have set up a 301 redirect on my site - forgot about that, duh.

Anyway, you're best setting up a 301 redirect to the URL you want to use or the one that has been used most often thus far.

[amritvirdi1987]

Originally Posted by MaverickUK

You either want http://site.com or http://www.site.com - whichever is the path to your domain, give him that. Let's say you visit your site using http://site.com, does it re-direct you to http://www.site.com or not? If it doesn't redirect, give 'em the link without the www.

Thanks for your reply mate. If I type in my site with a www then it redirects me to site.com, so I'll give him it without the www.

I just checked and I've submitted my site to Google with the prefix, should I try and change this or just leave it? My site is already fully indexed

[MaverickUK]

In regards to the Google Webmaster URL, it probably won't matter too much, however if i were you and it was my website i would change it just to be safe - as they say it's better to be safe than sorry!

[amritvirdi1987]

Thanks Maverick and all you guys .

I posted the same question to the seller over at Fiverr, and she replied:

"Different canonicalisation. Essentially google sees these URLs as different things, it does not associate them with one another. What this means is that if you were to use both 50/50 you would be splitting your link juice by half, the same goes for the trailing slash.
Use the same URLs all the time and be as consistent as possible about it so as not to do this "

and regarding resubmissions to Google Webmaster:

"I'd recommend submitting your site with whatever you're going to use the most, this includes whatever you're using on your servers, particularly what the links are within your own site, how you're pointing to yourself. Use that as what you use for linking and for everything else. Stay consistent to that."

Hope this helps everyone. If there is a chance that mis-linking will halve the link juice then it's a major thing that everyone should know.

I think if in doubt, just go to your site and whatever's in the URL bar, just use that.

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by amritvirdi1987

she replied:

"Different canonicalisation. Essentially google sees these URLs as different things, it does not associate them with one another. What this means is that if you were to use both 50/50 you would be splitting your link juice by half, the same goes for the trailing slash.
Use the same URLs all the time and be as consistent as possible about it so as not to do this "

and regarding resubmissions to Google Webmaster:

"I'd recommend submitting your site with whatever you're going to use the most, this includes whatever you're using on your servers, particularly what the links are within your own site, how you're pointing to yourself. Use that as what you use for linking and for everything else. Stay consistent to that."

Good answers. And thanks for posting them here. This was not just "someone selling a Fiverr service". It was someone who knew what she was talking about. (Many of the people who posted in this recent thread on the same subject could have done with reading those answers first! ).

[Studio13]

How about the fact that it numerological adds up to 666? =P

[Celeste Green]

Your Fiverr provider is right on. Even though to most people www. mysite.com & mysite.com look like the same domain, they actually are different web addresses - especially to the search engines. I’ve actually visited sites where I get an error page if I don’t type in the www. portion first but once I add it, the page exists again.

Usually it doesn’t matter & your visitors will get to the right page either way because most web servers are smart enough to realize it’s the same destination. Search engines, though, are more particular & will see these addresses as two different sites – just as your Fiverr provider said. Thus for the greatest SEO bang for the buck it really doesn’t matter which URL you pick for your backlinking campaigns so long as you consistently use that one. Then add a redirect code to your .htaccess file to have the other URL redirect to the version you’ve picked as your preferred URL.

If you’re unsure which version you’ve been using, type each page in your browser & see which currently has the higher page rank. You could also use Traffic Travis to see which version of your domain has the most/best backlinks & go with that one.

[ColinChia]

Hey,

After reading your post... you got me thinking, so I did a little searching on Big G (Google) and found some information that I thought could help you all!

Link: WordPress › Support » Difference between (www.) and without (www.)

Hope this helps,

Colin

[junne]

It doesn't matter what ever version you use there is no harm.

but stick to one which you are using like Google is showing only http://mysite.com then select that version in webmasters tool and 301 redirect http://www.mysite.com to http://mysite.com and start building backlinks.

you can use any version no harm in using.