Should you use www?
-
The age old question. Should I use "www." for a brand new content site assuming my goal (and most goals starting out) is to get to millions of visits per month? Does the community agree with, http://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/?
The only reason I question it honestly, since most high traffic companies in my search use www., is because moz doesn't.
Thanks for your help. Seems it would be quite a pain to go back once you have a lot of traffic.
-
Hey mag777! Happy New Year! Great question and one I'm asked a lot from my business advisory groups, clients and referral partners. It's one that undoubtedly always comes up in conversation when talking about either acquiring new domains or revamping a website... "Should we use the WWW or NON-WWW domain?"
In my 12+ years of web consulting and SEO, it has boiled down to a preference ideology. As mentioned by seoman10 in this thread, it could be seen as a shorter, easier to remember URL. When marketing the domain, you'd always want to confirm the WWW is redirected to the NON-WWW if this is the path you choose to take. And visa versa NON-WWW --> WWW.
As Gaston mentions too, check out your competitors URL structure. It's a quick glimpse up to the address bar while you are already doing your competitive research. Do some searches in Google as well for your website and competitors to see how much of the URL does or could display. Moz.com doesn't use WWW. They could get away with it because it's so short. I on the other hand almost need to with https://whiteboardcreations.com since it's a much longer domain. Keep this in mind for those domains you're working on, too.
From an SEO school of thought and how I now operate, I choose the NON-WWW simply because we can get just a little more of the URL to show in Google SERPs, if we're targeting inner pages to provide a hint more of visual for the searcher. The URL string matches more closely to the Title and Description. That is the way I look at this strategy.
Here is a quick video from Matt Cutts a few years back... should ease your concerns over redirects
https://youtu.be/Filv4pP-1nwEither way, the websites you work on for yourself or your clients will be fine as long as you are consistent for the entire site and redirects are tested and confirmed functional.
Cheers to a successful 2018 for you and everyone else reading!
- Patrick @ Whiteboard Creations (Apex, NC)
-
Hello mag777,
TL;DR;
In a SEO perspective, there is no difference.In my experience for the companies I've worked (and those im working) there is no difference in SEO for having www or non-www site.
How do we decide?- (as stated in the article you share) using the one that complies all the technical need of the website.
- Understanding all online competitors and trying to see which version they use and why
- For some companies its a commercial and branding thing. Just love to use one version.
In my opnion this is the case of the really big brands, they follow the wave that in the begginings(arround 2000's) every website used www so as the general public understad that was an internet direction.
That last point is backed by me asking them why they use that version and them saying: "because Coca-cola, Ebay and every big company uses www. So we want to imitate them"
Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
GR. -
Going by the book, technically a short domain will give you a slight benefit, but I wouldn't consider it's anything worth bothering with.
Not using www will make it slightly quicker to type and easier to remember, However when advertising your domain name off-line it is more explanatory to have a www. prefix (Without having to type website or HTTP(s):// every time).
I would say there is very little SEO benefit, I would assess it from a user angle.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Archive pages structure using a unique hierarchical taxonomy, could be good for SEO?
Hi, Preamble:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielecelsa
We are creating a website where people look for professionals for some home working. We want to create a homepage with a search bar where people write the profession/category (actually it is a custom taxonomy) that they need, like ‘plumbers’, and a dropdown/checkbox filter where they can choose the city where they need the plumber.
The result page is a list of plumber agencies in the city chosen. Each agency is a Custom Post Type for us. Furthermore, we are hardly working to make our SEO ranking as high as possible.
So, for example, we know that it is important to have a well-done Archive Page for each Taxonomy term, besides a well-done Results Page.
Also, we know it is bad for SEO to have duplicated pages or (maybe) similar pages, ranking for the same (or maybe also similar) keywords. Proposed Structure:
So, what we are thinking is to have this structure:
A unique hierarchical taxonomy that INCLUDES the City AND the profession! That means that our taxonomy ‘taxonomy_unique’ has terms like: ‘Rome’, ‘Paris’, ‘Dublin’ as father and also terms like ‘Plumbers’, ‘Gardeners’, ‘Electricians’ which are sons of some City father! So we will have the term 'Plumbers' son of 'Rome' and we will have also the term 'Plumbers' son of 'Paris'. Each of these two taxonomy terms (Rome/Plumbers and Paris/Plumbers) will have an archive page that we want to make ranking for the keywords ‘Plumbers in Rome’ and ‘Plumbers in Paris’ respectively. It is easier to think of it imagining the breadcrumbs. They will be:
Home > Rome > Plumbers
and
Home > Paris > Plumbers Both will have: a static content (important for SEO), where we describe the plumber profession with a focus on the city, like ‘Find the best Plumbers in Rome’ vs ‘Find the best Plumbers in Paris' a 'dynamic' content - below - that is a list of Custom Post Types which have that taxonomy term associated. Furthermore, also 'Rome' and 'Paris' are taxonomy terms that have their own archive page. In those pages, we are thinking to show the Custom Post Types (agencies) associated with that taxonomy term as a father OR maybe just a list of the 'sons' of that father, so links to those archive pages 'sons').
In both cases, there should be also a static content talking maybe about the city and the professionals it offers in general. Questions:
So what we would like to understand is: Is it bad from an SEO perspective to have 2 URLs that look like this:
www.mysite.com/Rome/Plumbers
and
www.mysite.com/Naples/Plumbers
where the static content is really similar and it is something like that:
“Are you looking for the best plumbers in the city of Rome”
and
“Are you looking for the best plumbers in the city of Naples”? Also, these kinds of pages will be much more than 2, one for each City.
We are doing that because we want the two different pages to rank high in two different cities, but we are not sure if Google likes that. On the other hand, each City will have one page for each kind of job, so:
www.mysite.com/Rome/Plumbers
www.mysite.com/Rome/Gardeners
www.mysite.com/Rome/Electricians
So the same question, does Google like this or not? About 'Rome' and 'Paris' archive pages, does Google prefer a list of Custom Post Types that have that father term associated as taxonomy, or a list of the archive pages 'sons', with links to those pages? What do you think about this approach? Do you think this structure could be good from an SEO perspective, or maybe there could be something better alternatively? Hoping everything is clear, we really appreciate anyone dedicating its time and leaving feedback.
Daniele0 -
Is there any set benefit in using a URL tracking engine on a domain for passing link juice?
Is there any set benefit in using a URL tracking engine on a domain for passing link juice? I.E. xxxx.com?$id=1111 to then redirect to shareasale? The client has an affiliate program and is thinking of running one in-house as well. Is there a benefit to a “redirect engine” that uses the website root domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KellyBrady1 -
What IP Address does Googlebot use to read your site when coming from an external backlink?
Hi All, I'm trying to find more information on what IP address Googlebot would use when arriving to crawl your site from an external backlink. I'm under the impression Googlebot uses international signals to determine the best IP address to use when crawling (US / non-US) and then carries on with that IP when it arrives to your website? E.g. - Googlebot finds www.example.co.uk. Due to the ccTLD, it decides to crawl the site with a UK IP address rather than a US one. As it crawls this UK site, it finds a subdirectory backlink to your website and continues to crawl your website with the aforementioned UK IP address. Is this a correct assumption, or does Googlebot look at altering the IP address as it enters a backlink / new domain? Also, are ccTLDs the main signals to determine the possibility of Google switching to an international IP address to crawl, rather than the standard US one? Am I right in saying that hreflang tags don't apply here at all, as their purpose is to be used in SERPS and helping Google to determine which page to serve to users based on their IP etc. If anyone has any insight this would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBassos0 -
What's the best redirect to use for a newer version of a blog post?
For example: suppose you have a post "The Best Games to Play for YouTube Gamers in 2016" and you want to make this a yearly series. Should you 301 the 2016 version to the new 2017 one? Should you use the canonical attribute? If 2016 isn't in the URL, should you make the 2017 one the new URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Edward_Sturm0 -
Are ALL CAPS construed as spamming if they are used in a meta description tag call to action?
I know this seems like an old school question. As a long time SEO I would never use ALL CAPS in a title tag (unless a brand name is capitalized). However I recently came across a Moz video about creating better calls to action in the meta description tags. Some of the examples had CTAs that were using all caps (i.e. CALL NOW! or LOWEST QUOTES!) I realize there is a debate about the user experience implications. However I'm more concerned about search engines penalizing websites that are using ALL CAPS CTAs in their meta description tags. Any feedback/advice would be appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Using unique content from "rel=canonical"ized page
Hey everyone, I have a question about the following scenario: Page 1: Text A, Text B, Text C Page 2 (rel=canonical to Page 1): Text A, Text B, Text C, Text D Much of the content on page 2 is "rel=canonical"ized to page 1 to signalize duplicate content. However, Page 2 also contains some unique text not found in Page 1. How safe is it to use the unique content from Page 2 on a new page (Page 3) if the intention is to rank Page 3? Does that make any sense? 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ipancake0 -
Opinions on Building Own Blog Network (Private Use Only)
With the lose of buildmyrank and many other services like this on the verge of extension I was looking at building a small blog network of my own for private use. Adsense and also 3 way linking. I'm wondering if anyone has experience with this? I know this takes a ton of time to build but if anyone who's done something like this and wouldn't mind sharing some of their tips I would greatly appriciate it. Quick Question
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | upick-162391
Is it safe to register say 30 domains under the same person? Or would it be wiser to use whois protection to guard the names? Anyone else want to contribute their 2c to this strategy please be my guest.0 -
"nocontent" class use for Google Custom Search: SEO Ramifications?
Hi all, Have a client that uses Google Custom Search tool which is crawling, indexing and returning millions of irrelevant results for keywords that are on every page of the site. IT/Web dev. team is considering adding a class attribute to prohibit Google Custom Search from indexing bolierplate content regions. Here's the link to Google's custom search help page: http://support.google.com/customsearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2364585 "...If your pages have regions containing boilerplate content that's not relevant to the main content of the page, you can identify it using the nocontent class attribute. When Google Custom Search sees this tag, we'll ignore any keywords it contains and won't take them into account when calculating ranking for your Custom Search engine. (We'll still follow and crawl any links contained in the text marked nocontent.) To use the nocontent class attribute, include the boilerplate content in a tag (for example, span or div) like this: Google Custom Search also notes:"Using nocontent won't impact your site's performance in Google Web Search, or our crawling of your site, in any way. We'll continue to follow any links in tagged content; we just won't use keywords to calculate ranking for your Custom Search engine."Just want to confirm if anyone can forsee any SEO implications the use of this div could create? Anyone have experience with this?Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MRM-McCANN0