With or Without WWW? That is the Domain Question!

Have you ever thought if your domain looks better with a WWW or not? Does it even matter?

Think about it. How do you do it normally? When you go to any of your favorite websites like google and yahoo, or even your own domain, do you even bother typing the extra www?

Well, putting it simply, yes it does matter. These two addresses may lead to the same website but they aren't seen to be one and the same by search engines, which can affect your rankings.

Adding the WWW in front of your domain is optional. Then again, there are others who encounter the arising of a problem wherein when they enter domain.com, they encounter an error404 wherein adding WWW in front of it doesn't call for the error404 and the other way around.

So how important is this thing? Well, given that there's a chance for people to think your page doesn't exist, it is important! But aside from that fact, should people manage to give you link banks, the linkback towards your domain with www and without www would produce different results in your SEO process. You wouldn't be optimizing those link backs for your benefit, right?

Well, you could always ask your backlinkers to actually change and add/remove the WWW. But that would be a hassle no questions asked.

Or, you could do a 301 Redirect!

This is pretty much the best solution you could do. The very purpose of this is is to redirect a user to www.domain.com whenever he types in only domain.com. Or you could do it the other way that whenever the user types www.domain.com, a redirect to domain.com would occur. This way, you maximize that incoming traffic to only one domain.

Oh noes! You knew it about the importance of having that Redirect 301 just now!? Whaaaa?? Well, you better get started, quick!

To enable a 301 Redirect, you must be able to access your .htaccess file. Normally, this will be found in your root domain. Some have it as htaccess.txt, you should rename that to .htaccess given that you know it wouldn't tamper much with the settings of your CMS. Just ask your administrator for some assistance just to be sure.

When you do find that .htaccess file, open and edit it.

Normally, you'd have these commands already active.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

Anyway, copy this code if:

You want your domain to always come with WWW

Rewritecond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.com [nc]
Rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

And copy this one if:

You want your domain to always come without WWW

Rewritecond %{http_host} ^www\.yourdomain\.com [nc]
Rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Remember to change 'yourdomain.com' with your actual domain with its respective TLD (.com, .net, .org, etc) like 'notoffline.com'.

Ideally, you should paste those codes just below the "RewriteBase /" command. I don't know much but I tried putting it on the very bottom at first and it didn't work.

Oh and just to double check, do try typing in the url of your website in your browser. It should work the way you want it. If you want it without the WWW, try typing in the domain with the WWW and it should automatically be redirected making the address as preferred and vice versa.

That's it folks! Hope you enjoyed that tip which can enhance your SEO a bit!

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