With or without www. in domain? It does not matter!

Actually we find the debate surrounding the issue of whether one should have www. or without www. in their domain to be extremely pointless. Search engines will still pick up your site regardless whether you choose to keep either one or otherwise. In my experience, I find that Google spiders my website URL with the www. far more quicker than the URL without the www.

Regardless, there is the danger of Google thinking that you have duplicate websites if both the www. and the non-www. of your URL are spidered and listed side by side in search engine rankings. To solve that issue, use a .htaccess redirect to forward either the non-www. URL to the www. one, or vice-versa. My personal recommendation is to go with the www. version.

Here is the .htaccess code for those who are interested in using it. This code must be placed in the root folder of your website (usually public_html) in a file named .htaccess


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomainname\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomainname.com/$1 [R=301,L]


Replace “yourdomainname” with your own domain.