I’m seeing a lot of this recently, that I should setup in my .htaccess file to make sure my domain always shows the www, or always without. Not both because the search engine spiders then think it is duplicate content…
Really!?
After so many years, do search engines not have this figured out by now? And why is the www. used anyway? What is the point?
It’s not because of any duplicate content problems, it’s because if some people link to your site with the subdomain and some people link to it without, you’re splitting your PR. If you redirect one to the other, all the PR gets attributed to the canonical domain.
OK… but still… should Google and them not have this figured out so it combines them?
Maybe they have. But there’s no reason you have to serve the same website on those two different URLs. Not everyone does.
Either way, it just takes two lines in a .htaccess file to redirect all the requests. Not a big deal.
To answer your last question first - I have no idea. None of my websites use www! Although I am tempted to set up a sub-domain uuuuuu. (or possibly 6u.) (I guess in some languages that joke would work better as vvvvvv.)
Yes, search engines are usually smart when it comes to working out that website.com/page and www.website.com/page are the same, especially when they look the same - but, if you want to secure top rankings, it never hurts to give them a little bit of a helping hand. After all, your competitors almost certainly are!
It’s a minor detail. The issue is they can actually point to different locations. If you can, set it up, so you don’t have to worry about it. The key is consistency, either always get links with the www. and a forward slash on the end or don’t use www. I’d recommend sticking with www. Hope this helps!
Specify your canonical - you can set your canonical URL in Google Webmaster Tools, for everyone else, use the .htaccess.
You can also use rel=“canonical” on-page.
The www isn’t being used by many people for what it was originally intended for. It was supposed to indicate the server name. You’d have say three servers all serving the same site from www1, www2, and www3 respectively. Then load sharing would direct about 1/3 or the www requests to each.
Most sites only have one copy of their site loaded and so don’t need the www at all.
When it came to actually implementing it it was implemented as a sub-domain rather than a server name anyway and so is not required even for sites like Goolge that use dozens of servers all accessible via the same address.
Basically it turned out that what it was originally intended for didn’t need it but by then people were used to typing www on the front of addresses.
Yeah. If your site shows www and non www URL means, your back links also have possibility to split and it is not fair. So better you need to redirect non www URL to www URL format. (canonical optimization)