www, or no www?

Most website homepages on the internet can be accessed via two different URLs, an address with a ‘www.’ in front of it, and one without. For example, typing in www.topclickmedia.co.uk will lead you to our homepage but so will plain old topclickmedia.co.uk. The problem is that because these are, in effect, two different site URLs, some search engines consider them to be different sites entirely. This opens up the possibility of them achieving different ranking positions and even different page rank scores.

Obviously this can lead to poor data and confusion when it comes to running SEO campaigns and gauging success, so it makes sense to canonicalize one of those URLs and redirect the other to it, in order to make sure that any data you get is accurate and valid. This of course begs the question, which one do you chose, the www. or the non www.?

Well the non www. has a few obvious advantages, it’s shorter for one thing, which makes it more memorable, not to mention easier to put on a business card/poster. Also, on modern browsers the ‘www.’ is basically redundant and, as any good coder knows, you should never miss a chance to streamline. Another minor point to consider is that getting rid of the ‘www.’ is a growing trend amongst tech savvy companies, leaving it on all your literature might make you look a little old hat.

However, the ‘www.’ is not without advantages, namely that without it some people might not recognise it as a website URL on the aforementioned poster, business card, etc. Also, word processors, email systems etc, only convert ‘www.’ addresses into live links after you type them, this can be useful if your URL gets bandied about in a lot of electronic communications.

Basically you should have a think about your demographic and site objectives then plump for one of them. However, more important than the decision itself is that it happens in a timely fashion, this is one of those situations where more is lost by indecision that wrong decision.

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