Is using www in url important?

I think it depends on how you registered your site at Google webmaster tools. There was a difference but I don't recall the details right now. Maybe someone else can elaborate.

I find it more commercially appealing without the www nowadays, but it's personal taste I guess!

Actually the shorter, the better in my opinion. It is easier for people to avoid adding three extra w's. Time is money

Both are proper and I don't think either seems more "legit" than the other.

Technially, they are two diferent URLs, so the most important thing is that you pick one and remian conistant. So if start using non-www, then make sure you do everything with non-www. Do not point some links to domain.com and some links to www.domain.com

After you make your choice, here are a few things you can do to help keep things in order.

First, register both versions in google webmaster tools, not just one.

Second, from within WMT go in to each domain and go to Site Configuraiton > Settings > Preferred Domain, and set the option that you chose

Third, use htaccess to redirect www to non-www, or visa-versa.

to go www > non-www use:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]


to go non-www > www use :

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]


This last step is especially important because search enginges treat each as a seperate URL. By setting up the 301, page rank can all flow back to the intended domain and help focus your efforts on the version you are trying to rank. Otherwise you could end up with two seperate positions in the serps, and if peopel were to backlink to the "wrong" verion, your primary version would not get credit for it.


That should do it, if you take all these precauions then you should be in good shape. I don't think I'm forgetting anything, but if I am, someone will come along and correct me.

Roell, this is called a canonical. to www or not to www, that is the question.

There is a relatively new tag that can solve the problem for Yahoo and Google when they index your site.

Here are two short articles that will help solve the mystery. I am not an affiliate of either.

What is a Canonical URL? | Ask Enquiro

SEOmoz | Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

:-Don

Allen gave you some good info too. I was posting at the same time as he. I really didn't mean to step on his fingers and push them into his keyboard.

It is not about "looking, it is about how you want the search engines to treat it, and what people will type in if they search for your site.

Use the www if you have to pick one or the other, but read aanderson and my posts above, and go to those two short articles about what is happening with canonicals.

:-Don

Personally I think the "www" makes a site look old fashioned and outdated - just my opinion of course. I'd never use it on one of my own sites for exactly that reason.

It's redundant too when you think about it. Initially it was used in the early days of the World Wide Web to differentiate websites from sites you "browsed" using older applications like Gopher, or from FTP sites.

But the "http" at the beginning already tells you that it's a website - it lets you know the service uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol. If it were my FTP server I'd be using "ftp" in place of "http". And not many sites allow connection to the public via Gopher or Veronica anymore (anyone who wasn't on the Internet in the 1980's probably doesn't even remember those applications)! So what exactly does "www" tell you? Nothing!

It's almost 2011 - "www' is so 1994!

Again just my opinion, as others have said stay consistent with whatever you choose and set your .htaccess file to accept both.

Bill

Oh poo Bill. Now I have to go get rid of all my "w" letters. Can I just erase them? :p


:-Don

I used www. as my canonical name on my first site, and now I kind of regret it. Looking at the site in Google, I think it would look a lot better without it (and most of my competition are using www, so I think it would stand out more without it). Would there be any issue with changing it around with a 301 redirect so that www.domain .com forwards to domain.com, considering backlinks etc?

Exactly. End of story

yes it will benefit in seo

i prefer to use domain without www
It's short and people normally type domain without www ( save time).

If after building 10 -15 pages how will google handle changing the sub-domain.

Would I lose ranking for those built pages?

In the case where google has already indexed pages with wrong linking convention, a 301 is your best line of defense. This will let google know the page has been moved, and they will (supposedly) do their best to redirect the flow of pagerank to the appropriate pages.

In cases where a 301 is not practical, like session ID and dynamic query string-derived pages, the canonical link element is your best line of defense.

Of course, submitting a site map and setting your preferred domain in GWMT can help too.

The 301/Canonical link element is not flawless, but it is the best thing you can do, as you cannot force the SEs to do anything. It's much better to make the change now than to go on creating more pages improperly.

10-15 pages is nothing, imagine if you ignored it and the site grew to several hundred pages, then you would really have something to worry about.

The best thing you can do is try to patch anything that is already broken then decide what linking convention you want to use going forward and stick to it.

I think that most people don't realize that www is nothing more than a subdomain!

What aandersen said before about sticking to your choice and redirecting properly is very important though, because I've seen a lot of domains where with www has PR1 and without PR2!

I think it depends on how are you going to use a web site. If your site is going to have many sub-domains, then you should always keep the main domain starting with w3

Either www or non www has no difference with each other.

For me it will not matter.

The WWW version looks more standard.
5 years ago, when I was still a regular web surfer, I preferred the WWW version.

Non-WWW was harder to remember for me and look suspicious in a way.
But this was my mindset 5 years ago. Who knows.