Does a Non-www Web Address Hurt SEO?
If you’ve ever created a website, you know that one of the first things you must do is register a domain name for a web address through a domain name server (DNS). This web address or URL is simply a more interpretable name for a string of numbers which represents an IP address that you and others can access through a web browser connected to the internet.
Some web addresses include the letters “www” followed by a period before the name of the website. The three w’s stand for World Wide Web and represents a generic subdomain of the main domain name.
Notice that I said some web addresses include the letters www. That’s because websites are not required to include www in order to work properly. Additionally, having a www or non-www web address does not matter for SEO.
There’s a catch though.
If you use a non-www address but index a www domain in search engines, or vice versa, you may be losing traffic and link authority. Worse, if you index both a www and non-www version of a site, search engines will index duplicate content which is detrimental for SEO.
The important thing is that you check search console tools like Google Search Console to check which version of the site is indexed. For example, if you look at the link for this article, you can see that the link to this Medium article does not include www in the web address. If your web address also excludes the www, that means whenever websites link back to your content, search engines are indexing non-www links. Once you know the version of the site that you’re indexing, you simply need to stay consistent when sharing links for SEO purposes.
Don’t worry if you use both www and non-www addresses. You just need to set up a 301 redirect to ensure that you do not lose traffic and link authority.
