WWW or Not? Whats the Difference?

[spy69]

Hey guys i was wondering. For backlinks and links overall, is there a big difference if you include www or dont include it? When i enter a link for a exchange or directory I mainly dont include http://www.yoursite.com but just http://yoursite.com. Is there a big differnce and how does this effect your link popularity?

Ready, set, discuss!

Thanks
Spy

 

[scrsteven]

hmm. I'm curious about this too. I don't know.

 

[Fork]

There is no major difference between the two as long as you STAY CONSISTANT! Search engines, as far as I know, treat each as two seperate domains. If you are not consistant with your www or no-www in links, your PR could be split. I currently do not have any articles I can point you to on this subject but I can tell you that if you have a few links around the internet that are not consistant with the others, a simple mod-rewrite can fix/help the problem.

 

[TargetDesigns]

Check that you can access your site without the www. cos i know i used to own a site that took me to a different part of my site when i didnt enter the www.

 

[Ray]

There is a big differnce, to search engines anywayz. Search engines see both ways at different domains. IT can be very bad for google pagerank to

say ter.com had a page rank of 9
but www.tet.com had a page rank of 3

 

[photomonkey]

I remember reading some where that some (all?) search engines will treat them as "different" domains.

The article mentioned 6 different combinations, however I do not remember the last two. Here are the four different combinations I remember.

1. http://www.domain.com/
2. http://www.domain.com
3. http://domain.com
4. http://domain.com/

I know that google sees them as different "sites". I have www.photomonkey.com with PR1 and photomonkey.com with PR0.

 

[spy69]

Whats that mod-rewrite? How does it work?

Thanks

 

[Ben]

www.<domain> is just an unneeded sub-domain.

 

[stepan]

not a lot of people use www but some still do. and it will only decrease traffic if www is cut down

 

[BurninDragon08]

Yeh, I never really got that.
I always use www because I am so used to typing it.
I am one of the fastest typers in the world and it's good practice.

 

[mole]

I always use www because I am so used to typing it. I am one of the fastest typers in the world and it's good practice.

:lol: how many wwwords per minute?

 

[dre]

www is basically a sub domain, if your checking you backlinks, and you put domain.com, you more likely to have more backlinks than if you put www . domain . com

 

[FusunMedia]

Thing is you don't want Google indexing files from both www.<yourdomain>.com and <yourdomain>.com, you'll get a duplicate content penalty which hurts your rankings severely.

 

[dre]

Fusunmedia how could we stop that?

 

[yeppers]

i think maybe (just a guess lol), that www. may have originally been a way to identify your site from ftp. etc etc, so www would have been for your web pages, and ftp obviously for your file transfer protocol, just a thought!

 

[dodoler]

as what i know Yahoo doesnt use http://www.news.yahoo.com/
It uses http://news.yahoo.com

I also would like to find out why...

 

[downloadfreak]

my site:
zymic.com PR5
www.zymic.com PR6

 

[Peter]

i think maybe (just a guess lol), that www. may have originally been a way to identify your site from ftp. etc etc, so www would have been for your web pages, and ftp obviously for your file transfer protocol, just a thought!

no thats what http is for.

 

[leviathon]

It's like this. Some web hosts (depending on their options) may make your site not work if the www wasn't typed. That's based on my exp, because I once used a host that didn't work without www

 

[Brian]

I never use the www, the less I have to type the better lol