When I am blog hopping, I see some people don’t use www. in their domain name. I don’t know if they want it like that or they cannot fix it. I had a blog that didn’t have www. in its URL. But when I was trying to build backlink, I was using www. in the URL. I thought there was no difference between having www. or no www. Any time, I type in the domain name on the address bar of the browser with www, it would take me to the website. I was expecting to see something like Address not found and it will tell me to try again. But instead of seeing that, I was seeing my blog. So I thought there was no big deal in that. I was proven wrong. As you know, somebody with a small blog would be obsessed with statistics.
One day, I was checking my backlinks with yahoo site explorer. If you go to yahoo site explorer, you would in the text box where there is Explore URL there is http:// already written. You just have to type in the full URL of the site you want to explore. I decided to type my domain name with no www. I found out I had 17 links. Then I decide to include www. in the domain. I found out I had 32 links. This means I had different backlinks.
If Yahoo is seeing my links like this, this means Google and other search engines are seeing them like that also.
I would recommended you should use www because if other people are linking to you they might not copy and paste your URL. They might think you have www. in your URL because that is the standard thing for most sites. So when they link to you, they would write www in the link.
Make Your URL to Have www (WordPress)
To Make your wordpress blog to have www in its domain name, login into Admin panel –> Settings –> General
In the WordPress address (URL) box, put www. in to the address name.
I had always wondered why this was as well. Thanks for the article this really explains the why of the www before your url, at least for link purposes.
Totally agreed with you that you must provide www. before your domain name as a formality.
Take my site as an example,
http://www.blogtactic.com is hosted by Google because I use blogspot template.
But http://blogtactic.com remain with my local hosting company because I need to host separate files and maybe create a special landing page (e.g. http://blogtactic.com/1_signup_a_day.htm)
I have set up a redirect inside the http://blogtactic.com/index.htm to reroute my readers to http://www.blogtactic.com