The WWW Controversy
Just look at www.yes-www.org and http://no-www.org and tell me there isnt a big HOO HA over whether or not to include the WWW in your URL.
This is a debate and many people are saying that the WWW is not at all influential in regards to your site’s promotional efforts. Google WILL index both the www and non www version of your site.
The reason i am writing this article today is because i have noted a queer indexing and ranking pattern that Google did to my client’s site. The site had an xml sitemap submitted for “procedural” sake, and the sitemap was generated for the non WWW version of the site. Later, I did exactly the same, this time, generating for the WWW version of the site. Google picked up and indexed both occasions. But the rankings were significantly better for the WWW version of the site. Food for thought? As of now, this pattern is still occuring.
For example, of 20 URL’s or pages SEO’d and submitted, 20 are indexed under non www and 12 indexed under WWW. The moment the remaining 8 of 20 of the WWW pages are indexed, they get high rankings almost immediately. ( This is bearing in mind that the 8 remaining pages indexed under non www were not ranked, or low ranked.)
Anyhow, if you want to put your foot out of the confusion to ease yours and Google’s mind, simply modify your htaccess file and implement a redirect like so:
If you want to remove the “www.” add this to your .htaccess file (this works for Apache). If you don’t have a .htaccess file create one with this in it.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
If you want to add the “www.” add this to your .htaccess file (Apache only). If you don’t have a .htaccess file create one with this in it.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
In both cases swap out the example part for your domain and the .com part for something else if you are not a .com.
