WWW or No WWW? Which One Do I Choose?
Are you currently paying for web hosting? Are you happy with your web hosting service or have you had problems? Let us know! Check out our list of hosting providers and leave your review!
This is a question asked quite a bit on the internet. As a quick refresher or for those of you who aren’t aware, a website can have 2 different addresses. A website can have an address at www.webhostsdeals.com or it can have an address at webhostsdeals.com. So there are 2 different versions of the website? Nope, both addresses will take you to the same place.
So what is the difference then?
None actually! Other then the text itself of course. This is one of those things relating to personal preference or branding rather then having any actual effect on your site whatsoever. There have been countless discussions and tests on whether or not using www or not using it has any effect on your site.
So then why do people ask? Because some think that having one form of the address or the other will give them some kind of special privilege in the search engines. It doesn’t, although there are people that swear by it. However, it does have an effect when it comes to dealing with Google’s PageRank.
PageRank – Page Auhthority
Google uses a rating system to determine a web page’s authority against another web page. It is based off of a scale rating from 0 to 10 with 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. There are many discussions on the internet about PageRank and a quick Google search will give you some more information.
Obviously you want your page to rank higher on the scale. Building a high PageRank is beyond the scope of this article as there are many factors that affect your ranking. So what does this have to do with using www or no www? Glad you asked!
Remember that you can visit a web page by either going to www.webhostsdeals.com or webhostsdeals.com and that Google uses PageRank to determine a web page’s authority. Well, believe it or not, Google will count the 2 different addresses as 2 different addresses even though they lead to the same site. As you can see, for those trying to achieve a higher PageRank this can be a major problem. You don’t want PageRank split between 2 different versions of your webpage, this dilutes the ranking and the authority that that page has. Even though by visiting either address of the site we arrive at the same page, Google has a different system.
So you can see where deciding whether or not to use www for your website can cause issues.
Sending visitors to the right address
With certain files and code we can make search engine robots visit the right address. However, we can’t control what an actual human being will type in to get to our website. One person may use www and the next person may not.
Lets look at a quick example. Major companies spend millions of dollars advertising their websites. Most of them use www in their advertising as it is the standard. Even though these companies spend all this money, people will still visit their website without using www. Now, this isn’t too big of a deal as most visitors could care less whether or not your site uses www as either address will get them to the same place.
As stated above, this whole should I use www or not debate is more related to PageRank and branding.
So how exactly do we get the search engine robots and our human visitors to the right address?
Well, unfortunately it isn’t going to be easy if you know nothing about how the internet works. There are a lot of technical details when it comes to deciding and implementing using www or not using it.
Fortunately there are many web sites and forums out there that have some great guides on how to do this. Here are just a few of them:
Using mod_rewrite to direct traffic to your site
