With or without www?

With or without www is simply one of the biggest questions you need to ask yourself when starting a new site, but unfortunately most people simply forget to decide.

First of all we need to talk about why it's important to decide on with or without. One of the reasons is the search engines. Links to sampleaddress.com and www.sampleaddress.com are counted as links to two different sites by search engines which will impact negatively on your SERP. Instead of finding 20 links to www.sampleaddress.com search engiens may find 10 links to www.sampleaddress.com and 10 links to sampleaddress.com.

One other reason is branding. How would you like your visitors to remember your site? At XavierMedia.com we're using www, but at our new site adv.erti.se we're not (you can still type www.adv.erti.se and it will work).

If you're using www you should remember that sometimes visitors type a few w too much or too little. So if you're using you should make sure that w.sampleaddress.com, ww.sampleaddress.com and wwww.sampleaddress.com will work too as a service to your visitors.

If you have a really popular site you may even consider to register wwwsampleaddress.com just to be on the safe side (www.sampleaddress.com without the dot).

Are you using www for your sites?

/Andreas