The www and the non-www of your website
A quick test ...Type your website's URL into your browser including the www subdomain i.e. http://www.yoursite.com. Your website appears, right? And, it appears with the www. before you domain name in the URL window of your browser. OK, good.
Now, type in your URL without the www prefix i.e. http://yoursite.com into your browser window. What do you get? Does it display the URL with the www. or without it?
Basically, if you get your website appearing without the www. prefix when you type it in, then effectively you can reach your website's home page from two different URLs (which could turn into three if your site directs your visitors to the home page with index.html, default.asp, etc. ... but this is another article!).
However you publicise your URL you must have URL consistency. So, if you decide that you would like your site to be http://yoursite.com, then anyone typing in http://yoursite.com or http://www.yoursite.com should get the URL of the non-www version i.e. http://yoursite.com in their URL window.
Why is this important? Well, search engines view each URL as a different URL. So, if your site can be accessed from two different URLs then the search engines will divide its weighting from inbound links between the both of them and only index one of them.
This means that the strength of your inbound links (the most important factor in search engine optimisation) is weakened. Also, your URL could be manipulated in the search engines by your competitors i.e. if you create enough links to the other URL, the search engines could index your web pages that way.
The solution is to set up a 301 redirect on the URL you don't wish to be accessed. This basically tells the world (and the search engines) that you do not use that version of your URL and have redirected the visitor to the URL you do use.
This article was not designed to provide a solution for every situation and we would definitely advise that you get some help with rectifying this problem (if it applies to you).
However, here are some pointers to send you in the right direction ...
If you are not able to configure your web server, you can set up a 301 within your DNS settings or port your (not wanting to be accessed) URL over to a different IP address and create a 301 redirect using a PHP or ASP file.
If you can configure your web server you can alter the settings to ensure there is a standard URL you will get traffic to.
Lastly, Google have just incorporated URL standardisation in their sitemap programme. This is a great feature and we recommend you use it. However, it will only help you with Google and not the other search engines.
Please Contact SearchPath if you need further help with your Internet marketing or search engine optimisation.
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