What is Better With WWW or Without WWW?
When search engines like Google find two sites of near-similar urls, the difference usually lies in whether the url contains “www” or not. One site may have it, while the other may not. For Google and such serious search engines, this is a big issue. And that’s because it could mean that the web page really points to the same page, leading to a duplication of content. For a search engine that indexes sites, this is misleading.
If a search engine finds this, it will mete out a penalty to the site owner.
Secondly, search engines place great emphasis on inbound and outbound links (links from and to your site). Perhaps some of these links have the www in the url while others do not. By not including the www in your url, you are splitting the links and thereby forcing the search engine to see those links as separate pages. As a result, your page ranks will also be split and not perform as well as you might have anticipated. This is where canonicalization helps.
What is canonicalization? It is the process by which a website commands a search engine to display only the url you want displayed in the former’s page rankings. When a search engine has several choices of urls, it picks the best among them and refers to their home pages. For example, you have: a) www.simple.com b)simple.com/ c) www.simple.com/index.html d) simple.com/home.asp
From the above list of websites, note that some go with the “www,” while others do not. Though all these urls are different, when search engines “canonicalize” your url, they pick the best among these to be the chosen representative among them. On your part, you pick the url you want to go with and it should be one that is used on all pages of your site.
Now, use this one for all the pages of your site.
Tips:
• Apart from the above, you can also set your web server in such a way that if he is looking for simple.com, he finds it by your adding 301 permanent redirect to your basic site which is www.simple.com. This is a pointer to Google to know which url you prefer to be canonical. And, if you constantly update your site with fresh content, this is the perfect answer. According to the url of your choice, page rankings will be made.
• For the best results from canonicalization, always use lower case ONLY for everything, even if all domains are not case sensitive.
• Omit using any default value for something, if you wish. For instance, you can forcibly use the www subdomain onto urls if you find them missing. Alternatively, you could choose to omit it. Choose any one and stick with it.
Examine all parts of the url for default values that can be eliminated. For example, the default HTTP port of your site is perhaps 80. So, if you get a request for http://www.simple.com:80/page.php, it’s as good as asking for http://www.example.com/page.php. Refer this request of port 80 to your canonical URL and ask for the default port to be deleted.
