Will not having a www redirect affect google/bing seo?

Question

If my website only responds to www.example.com, and not example.com, does this affect search rankings at all? I haven't found anything to confirm or deny this for any major search engine, and I'm curious.

Answer 1

i was reading an article on this a while back from ScottGuthrie that relates to IIS SEO Toolkit - the main points are as follows:

4 Really Common SEO Problems Your Sites Might Have

Below are 4 really common scenarios that can cause your site to inadvertently expose multiple URLs for the same content. When this happens external sites linking to yours will end up splitting their page links across multiple URLs - and as a result cause you to have a lower page ranking with search engines than you deserve.

SEO Problem #1: Default Document

IIS (and other web servers) supports the concept of a “default document”. This allows you to avoid having to explicitly specify the page you want to serve at either the root of the web-site/application, or within a sub-directory. This is convenient – but means that by default this content is available via two different publically exposed URLs (which is bad). For example:

http://scottgu.com/

http://scottgu.com/default.aspx

SEO Problem #2: Different URL Casings

Web developers often don’t realize URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web. This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs:

http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx

http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx

SEO Problem #3: Trailing Slashes

Consider the below two URLs – they might look the same at first, but they are subtly different. The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings:

http://scottgu.com

http://scottgu.com/

SEO Problem #4: Canonical Host Names

Sometimes sites support scenarios where they support a web-site with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself. This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling:

http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx/

http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx/

full article at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/04/20/tip-trick-fix-common-seo-problems-using-the-url-rewrite-extension.aspx

Answer 2

Google treats www.example.com and example.com as two separate domains (since 'www' is technically a sub-domain). Neither is better than the other in terms of SEO, as long as you don't mix and match links - i.e. some links point to example.com while others point to www.example.com.

If you don't have any redirects from one to the other, then links into the site (and so visitor traffic) may be split between the two sub-domains, effectively meaning you're competing with yourself in search engine rankings. It's probably a good idea to pick one (either example.com or www.example.com) then set up redirects on the other domain, and/or add canonical links to pages so that search engines know that the pages should be treated as the same site.

See here for more on canonical links in www vs non-www links.