The Difference Between www. and http:// With No www.

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

These 20 SEO tips are a gold mine. I’d like to elaborate on though:

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html. Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

A lot of webmasters are confused, particularly new webmasters, about the difference between domain names with www at the forefront and those without. If you purchase a domain anme these days you’ll automatically get a redirect from www to the non-www site, or vice versa. In other words, you won’t find a competitor snagging up one while you’ve got the other. Buying one buys both. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have anything to worry about.

When performing your link building campaigns you need to pick one or the other and focus on that. All of your links should point to one domain or the other. Otherwise, you’re splitting your links and killing your link popularity. If you have 50,000 links with 25,000 pointing to www.imagoober.com and the other half pointing to http://imagoober.com then you only have a link popularity of 25,000. By ensuring that all of your links point to the exact same domain name, you’ll double your link popularity. Believe me, that will make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things. That link popularity will determine where you fall in search engine rankings and affect your PageRank. Splitting your links could cost you valuable business.