With WWW or Without WWW

When you create a Web site or a blog it can usually be accessed either through http://www.yourdomainname.com or http://yourdomainname.com. Although this feature may seem useful at first sight (since people can type whatever version they prefer) in the long term, it will harm your search engine rankings.

The problem arises because Yahoo, Google, and other search engines display the two versions as two separate sites, even if they have exactly the same content (technically, in fact, the "www" means a subdomain that could point to different content).

Search engine ranking is based, among other things, the number of links to your site. If you keep the two versions available some people link to http://www.yourdomainname.com while others link to the http://domain.com, mainly the division backlinks your account.

Having two different versions might damage you in lists and Social Bookmarking sites as well. The right image was extracted from Populicious, a site that lists the most popular sites on Delicious. If you take a look, you notice that Digg is listed both in the 7th and 10th position. This occurs because the list deals http://www.digg.com and http://digg.com as two different sites. Shoud only version available is the total number of Digg place on the first position of the list.

How do you solve the problem for your blog? The easiest way is to set up a "301 permanent redirect" of "non-www" for the version with a "www", or vice versa. Once the redirection is in place whenever a visitor types http://domain.com it will be automatically redirected to the "www" version.

By the way, if you're wondering whether you should go with or without "www", it does not matter. The important thing is that you take one and stick with it.