You may realize that if you enter a URL like rankmagic.com into your browser you get to the same page as when you enter www.rankmagic.com. It doesn’t seem to matter which way you do it. But for the search engines, it can make a difference.

Background

The WWW refers to the World Wide Web, which many people consider to be synonymous with the Internet. Technically, it’s not. The WWW runs on the internet like email, but is not the Internet itself. The “www” part of an Internet address isn’t usually required, though, so you normally can use it or not when typing a URL into the address bar of your browser.

Search Engine Implications

Search engines see addresses with and without the “www” as separate addresses. Why should that matter? Because link popularity is an essential factor in good ranking and use of the “www” can affect your link popularity. Here’s how:

Suppose you have 100 links pointing to http://example.com and another hundred links pointing to http://www.example.com. Search engines will see that each URL has 100 inbound links, and that’s all you’ll get credit for. However, if they all pointed to http://www.example.com you’d get credit for all 200 links.

It can actually be worse than that, as it’s possible to have four different URLS for your home page like this:

1. example.com
2. www.example.com
3. example.com/index.html
4. www.example.com/index.html

This problem of multiple addresses for the same web page is called canonicalization. We have a full discussion of it on our web site.

What To Do?

You can’t control how other people link to your site and whether they use the “www” in the address or not. But you can set up a permanent redirect so that any time they don’t use the “www”, the link gets directed to the “www” version of your web address. We have instructions on how to fix your home page canonical issues on our web site.

Aside from redirecting external links to the “www” version of your address, you should also make sure your internal links pointing to your home page do the same. It’s very common for home page links from other pages on your site to include the actual page, as in www.example.com/index.html (there are several possible alternatives to index.html that your site may use). You should make sure that  your own links to your home page don’t include that “index.html” part, and just point to www.example.com.

Read more about that pesky “www” and canonicalization here.

Mark Jackson has a good article in Search Engine Watch about making sure your internal links are consistent. While there’s enough good stuff there to make it worth your while to read the entire article, of particular importance is his discussion of links to your home page. We find many (perhaps most) of our clients commit this easily fixed mistake.

Keepin’ Your Internal Linking “Real”

Now let’s look at the home page of your site. I would consider your home page to be located at http://www.example.com/, not at http://www.example.com/index.html or http://www.example.com/default.aspx. Even though the index.html or the default.aspx file is your site’s home page, the real home page is http://www.example.com because that’s the page everyone tends to link to when they link to your Web site.

So, why should your internal navigation link to the index.html file instead? Your Web site’s “home” link in your navigation should link to your real home page (i.e., http://www.example.com/). If you aren’t being consistent when you link internally on your site, something you have complete control over, then you’re losing out on better search engine rankings.

It’s quite possible that your internal linking inconsistency isn’t passing “link credit” around your site properly. The home page is the most important page on your site. Why pass some of your “link credit” to one URL (http://www.example.com/index.html) while other “link credit” is being passed to another URL (http://www.example.com/)? It’s important to fix the internal links to your home page, and consistently link to what I call your “real” home page.

Many webmasters and web site owners aren’t aware of this hidden killer of search engine rankings. The problem occurs when multiple URLs can access the same page on your site. For example, all of the following are likely to point to the same page:

• http://samplesite.com
• http://www.samplesite.com
• http://www.samplesite.com/index.html

If other web sites link to yours inconsistently (which will happen sooner or later), different versions of the same pages can get indexed in search engines. This forces the search engines to choose the best URL to rank. Your PageRank will be diluted by the fact that some links are going to different URLs for your page.

Do you have this problem? It’s easy to check. In your browser, navigate to www.yoursite.com (substituting your own domain, of course). Then go to yoursite.com (without the “www.”). If both go to the exact same URL (check the address box in your browser), then you’re in good shape. But if one displays your URL with the “www” and the other displays it without, then you have this problem.

How to Fix This

First, choose which version you want to use — with or without the www. Then, have your webmaster injsert the following at the beginning of your .htaccess file. (Don’t worry: your webmaster will know what that file is. Unfortunately, this only works if your site is hosted on a Unix or Linux server. If it’s hosted on a Windows server, your webmaster will have to check for the proper way to do this on your server.)

To use the with-www version of your site, use this code, substituting your domain as appropriate:

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

To use the without-www version of your site, use this (again substituting as appropriate):

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

That’s it! Just test to make sure it works.

Of course, you still need to make sure all the sites linking to yours are linking to the right version, and that if they’re linking to your home page they’re not including the actual page filename after the .com. But this little trick should take care of the worst of things.