This is one of the most interesting questions I ever had to ask someone, what is your website address? is it http://www.example.com or http://example.com ?

The guy was confused, he asked me whats the difference they are both the same. Well they aren’t the same for certain search engines and particularly Google. The web crawlers have had always thought example.com without the www and with the www are two different sites.

This can have a huge impact on your SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), as the PageRank value is shared.

A 301 permanent redirect would solve this issue. Set up a redirect on the preferred version of your website, either from the www version to none www or vice versa, is the best solution and make things easy for Googlebot.

Check how your pages are indexed on Google by typing “site:www.example.com” (without quotes) and obviously replacing example with your domain.

If the pages of the results show only one version of your website indexed, that’s fine if not you may have to set up a redirect as mentioned above.

Happy SEO

By Farhan Fawzer A leading SEO Specialist from Sri Lanka