A Simple Solution to the Non WWW, WWW Question

One of the most shocking things a webmaster learns upon entering the world of SEO is that they need to choose between either the WWW version or non-WWW version of their URL. As annoying as it is, not doing so can create huge duplicate content and PageRank dispersion issues that hamper your rankings. However, what we rarely discuss is how to choose which of the two to use.

The answer is fairly simple. Determine which version has the most inbound, external links across all its pages and then use that as the canonical version of your domain. If the sum of all the mozRank of links pointing to your http://domain.com/* version of your site is greater than the http://www.domain.com/* version, then you should choose the non-WWW.

Well, here is a simple tool that does just that. Type in your domain name and it will determine for you which one you should go with. Note: If you don’t have any backlinks to your site, this tool is useless. Choose whichever you want (www or non-www) and go get some links!

1 Comment

  1. DCCutler
    Oct 25, 2011

    Just gave this a try – it simply recommended whichever version of the domain (non vs www) I’d typed in.

    Author Response: We have fixed that bug. We prompt the user to include the www. in the URL, we didn’t think that people would delete that and then type in the rest of their domain. Now we check either way.

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