www and no www affects ranking?

[SEG]

Here is one I can't find good info on.
I have to check my ranking on sites by using www and by not entering the www for the address.
Google Webmaster tools has the option to have it make them like one, it's been over a week and I don't see the results from that.
Since I first heard of this a few weeks ago I've been sticking to using just one, the www .
So, how big of a deal is this?
How can it be prevented in the future when starting a website?
How can I correct it now?

[dvduval]

I would recommend doing a redirect. That way the user is forced to go to only 1.

[Ricky Dawn]

Hey,

All you have to do is setup a 301 redirect from your www/non www to the other one.

Google will then have no choice but to use whichever you have chosen.

Also do not change it once you set it, any links you have gained will be lost for example: If you have links pointing to the www. version and you switch it to the non www version then those links will not be as good, sorry if thats confusing.

It isn't really a big deal which one you choose neither will affect your rankings.

Ricky

[dragonblogger]

Agree with everyone else here, you should use www as the standard, since many corporate auto proxies and firewalls can block direct to domains without www and www is pretty much the standard. Use Google Webmaster tools or your hosting provider to setup the non-www to www redirect

[ibacklinkpro]

It doesn't matter whether you have www. or no www but you need to have someone (yourself) setup a redirect from non www and from index.html (ow whatever the name of your hamepage is) to all 301 redirect to whichever you choose otherwise google could see them as 3 different pages and split the backlink juice between them (I've even heard of the rare cases where some pages got penalized for duplicate content) if you are on a linux server you should use .htaccess to make those redirects (sometimes your host customer service will help with that, mine did)

[ShowSpace]

- Choose www or non-www, whatever you like best. It has NO EFFECT on Google rankings. If any firewalls block access to non-www I don't know but it sounds highly unlikely.
- Forwarding from www to non-www (or vice-versa, whichever you chose in 1.) is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL. It should be a 301 (permanent) redirect, preferred over 302 (temporary). Depending on which webserver you use (Apache, Nginx, etc.) and if you have access to the configuration files, setting up the redirect is different, but quite easy in most cases. Google "apache www redirect" for example.
- Make sure deep links are properly redirected. Example: if you prefer www.domain.com over domain.com, the URL www.domain.com/a/long/path should be forwarded to domain.com/a/long/path, not just domain.com.
- Once you set up the forwarding, you can verify the non-www and the www version in Google Webmaster Tools and set a preferred domain. I don't think this is really necessary, though, as Google will notice very quickly that the one forwards to the other.
- Even changing from using one version over the other at a later point in time shouldn't be a problem since only a minuscule amount of link juice is lost when doing a 301 redirect, especially on the same host.

[SEG]

Thanks everyone.
I feel I know what to do now.

[alansumit]

You can write 301 redirection for this issue.

[ghazia]

See which version of your URL has got indexed in Google. For example if the non www version (abc.com) has got indexed, do a 301 permanent redirect from (www(.)abc(.)com) to abc(.)com.

[magic99]

I would suggest to redirect for one domain, with www and without www google treat as two different domain

[ebrg]

Originally Posted by ShowSpace

- Choose www or non-www, whatever you like best. It has NO EFFECT on Google rankings. If any firewalls block access to non-www I don't know but it sounds highly unlikely.
- Forwarding from www to non-www (or vice-versa, whichever you chose in 1.) is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL. It should be a 301 (permanent) redirect, preferred over 302 (temporary). Depending on which webserver you use (Apache, Nginx, etc.) and if you have access to the configuration files, setting up the redirect is different, but quite easy in most cases. Google "apache www redirect" for example.
- Make sure deep links are properly redirected. Example: if you prefer www.domain.com over domain.com, the URL www.domain.com/a/long/path should be forwarded to domain.com/a/long/path, not just domain.com.
- Once you set up the forwarding, you can verify the non-www and the www version in Google Webmaster Tools and set a preferred domain. I don't think this is really necessary, though, as Google will notice very quickly that the one forwards to the other.
- Even changing from using one version over the other at a later point in time shouldn't be a problem since only a minuscule amount of link juice is lost when doing a 301 redirect, especially on the same host.

After doing this does it matter if link building is randomly to www and non-www domains ?