One of the very first things you need to decide when setting up a new website or blog is whether to use www or no www in front of your domain. It\u2019s a decision you need to take once in the beginning and stick to it for the lifetime of your website.<\/p>\n
In this post, we will examine what is difference between having www in your URL and no www and what are the best practices when it comes to search engine optimization<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n What is the technical difference between having www in your URL and not having www?<\/p>\n Let\u2019s see a couple of examples:<\/p>\n URLs with www<\/strong><\/p>\n URLs with no www<\/strong><\/p>\n Domains with no www in front are also called naked domains. Domains with www can also act as a hostname which can sometimes be easier to manage when it comes to cookies, in cases where you have a number of subdomains assigned to the www domain.<\/p>\n This is a really technical thing which in reality won\u2019t affect the majority of websites, so if you are having difficulties understanding what this means, just skip this explanation and move on to the big question.<\/p>\n Should I use www or no www in front of my domain?<\/strong><\/p>\n The answer is simple. It depends on your personal preference. There is no SEO advantage from using one format or the other.<\/p>\n Three things are important:<\/p>\n First, to configure your website to \u2018listen\u2019 to only one of the variations (more on this below).<\/p>\n Second, to let Google and other search engines<\/a><\/strong> know what is your preferred choice.<\/p>\n Third, to be consistent and use the chosen variation when adding internal links<\/a><\/strong> to your content or when running link building<\/a><\/strong> campaigns.<\/p>\n Google considers http:\/\/ and http:\/\/www as two different websites<\/strong><\/p>\n Why all the fuss about www and no www? Because Google considers these to be two different websites.<\/p>\n In other words, in the eyes of Google, http:\/\/example.com and http:\/\/www.example.com are two different websites and if you don\u2019t specify which version you want to use, you will end up having SEO issues.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s see how to set the preferred domain for your website and how to communicate your decision with Google so that you avoid and crawling and indexing<\/a><\/strong> issues.<\/p>\nwww vs no www<\/h2>\n
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