With or without www in site address?

The question in the title can be formulated otherwise, something like: ” How does the SEO affect the web in front of the domain? “Or one more loud” Do we have duplicate content if the site displays pages with www and without www? “.

The domain is free of www, but for historical reasons it has kept the habit of putting www in the domain when we access the domain in the browser, to differentiate the address of the site from the ftp or mail address, etc.

But now we all know what is a domain and we do not ask ourselves what WordPress.com refers to.

Whether it be a web or ftp or email address?

It is not wrong to put www in the field as it is not wrong not to put it. 

However, it is advisable to limit ourselves to a single variant.

For SEO reasons, for reasons of indexing, for reasons of ease.

If we use www to have all the internal addresses written with www, if we do not want to use the prefix then do not use it!

Google will index the site in both variants and will decide for itself which variant it will display in the search results.

In other words, it will not show the page you are looking for in both variants, it will stop on one.

We can influence which variations we prefer using Google Webmaster Tools :

• On the Google Webmaster Tools homepage, click on the site you want.
• Under the site configuration, click Settings.
• In the Preferred Domain section, select the desired option.

About duplicate content is a gigantic bibliography, it is an obsession of all SEOs that they do not have duplicate content. Which is right and perfectly true. Google will treat spam as having duplicate content on different web addresses, especially if this practice is repetitive and not accidental.

However, in the SEO specialists approach, there is also a lot of urban legend.

Google does not penalize a site because there are several links to one page on the same site.

As it does not penalize the existence of the domain with www or without www. It will simply choose one of the variants and that variant will be indexed and delivered to searches.

However, it is advisable not to have different URLs for the same page. You may wonder: why if we are still not penalized?

My answer is in the WordPress slogan “Code is Poetry”! In other words, to make it easier to find pages.

For a unitary and beautiful web presence on your site or personal blog.

Some technical details.

Once we’ve chosen how we want the domain url and after we’ve told you about Webmaster Tools, we’re going to push things a bit in the direction that’s been set.

So if a user writes the www address automatically to be loaded with the www version, or vice versa.

For this, you need to edit the .htaccess file and write a few lines of code, so you need to make a permanent 301 redirect.

If the first directive already exists in the file, it should not be rewritten.

Let’s see what Matt Cutts says about 301 (permanent redirect).