To WWW or not to WWW? That’s the question!

When it comes to building websites, here are a few basic SEO or Search Engine Optimization concepts that everyone needs to know to avoid wasting their time and money. For my Malaysia students I cover a lot of this in the Internet Millionaires BootCamp, but in this post let’s tackle a seemingly simple issue.

Should you use “www” in your domain name or not?

For example, do I want my website to appear in Google as http://gobalakrishnan.com or http://www.gobalakrishnan.com? Is there any significant difference between the two?

In my experience it makes no difference whether you use the “www” or not. But what does matter is consistency. If you plan not to use “www” in links back to your website, then follow that method all the way.

Don’t submit your site to 10 directories using “www” and another 10 directories without them. Keep it consistent if you want your search engine rankings to improve fast.

Google recognizes the two as different versions of the same page, and it really wants to keep just one. But which one does Google use? By being inconsistent in your linking you’re giving Google mixed signals.

Ganted, you cannot control how other people link to you. For example you may want to link to my site from your blog as http://gobalakrishnan.com – and there is no way I can control what you do. But if I am actively using the “www” version of the URL, then there should be significantly more “www” links out there.

So what do you do, if you were not that careful in the past? Is there any way to fix it?

There are two simple methods: (1) use WordPress or (2) edit the .htaccess

Both are actually the same. WordPress helps to edit the .htaccess file in your server, which controls file permissions. If your site is not running on WP or other CMS systems then you need to do it manually.

Edit / Redirect in WordPress

In WordPress, just go to Settings > General and you can see something like this:

WordPress Redirect

By default, you will probably have the version without the “www”. This is ok, if you’ve been using the non-www version of your site URL all the while. However if you use the www version, then please change your site URL here – and never change it again.

Edit / Redirect in cPanel

cPanel Redirect

First you need to do a test. Which version of your site URL is currently displayed in your browser? What happens when you type in the other version (with or without www) in the browser? Which version do you plan on using?

Does it get redirected automatically? For example if you type in http://gobalakrishnan.com it will automatically redirect to http://www.gobalakrishnan.com – if this is the case for your site then you need to do nothing more.

If it does not automatically redirect, login to your cPanel account and go to the Redirects section, and enter something like this:

Make sure the “Do not redirect www” option is checked, otherwise your site will just be redirecting in an endless loop. However if you prefer to use your domain name without the “www”, the check the option “Only redirect with www” and enter the non-www URL in the text field.

Click on “Add” and your redirect problem will be solved. Test it out by typing in the variations in your browser.

For example, now http://weightlossdetective.com redirects to http://www.weightlossdetective.com

(It may take Google some time to re-index your site and make the required changes)

Remember, making redirects is a fix to the problem. The problem is inconsistency. If you can be rather consistent in your linking then you don;t really need to worry about this.

Lesson: Always use the same version of your domain name when ever leaving comments, or putting links up on other sites.