www is just an archaic remain from the beginning of the World Wide Web. There is no need to use it.
The down side of the 2 options is a mixture of backlinks some to www. some without, will be treated by search engines as 2 separate entities, splitting the search rank juice. You want to consistently use the same form.
Some hosting services have simple checkbox configuration options to redirect to one or the other, or to allow either untouched. It is actually quite rare for a server not to redirect.
Sometimes an address on a business card less the http, is more clearly a web address when it starts www.mysite.com
Many people will say no difference between http://www.mysite.com or http://mysite.com but according to search engines it's two different urls. And it has two different google pr. For this reason it's important to use 1 stable url and get links in such way.
Try the following in your .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=permanent]
RewriteRule ^/index.html$ http://www.domain.com [R=permanent, L]
The down side of the 2 options is a mixture of backlinks some to www. some without, will be treated by search engines as 2 separate entities, splitting the search rank juice. You want to consistently use the same form.
Some hosting services have simple checkbox configuration options to redirect to one or the other, or to allow either untouched. It is actually quite rare for a server not to redirect.
Sometimes an address on a business card less the http, is more clearly a web address when it starts www.mysite.com
Many people will say no difference between http://www.mysite.com or http://mysite.com but according to search engines it's two different urls. And it has two different google pr. For this reason it's important to use 1 stable url and get links in such way.
Try the following in your .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=permanent]
RewriteRule ^/index.html$ http://www.domain.com [R=permanent, L]
- The first rule should redirect every request for domain.com/file.ext to www.domain.com/file.ext
- The second redirects /index.html, with or without www, to www.domain.com
- Google updates backlinks ever few weeks (there is really no set schedule). Your backlinks are simply being read by google as <b>www</b>.domain.com, not domain.com (which is good).
