SEO optimization www or no www – I am regularly asked by bloggers and website owners about SEO optimization and the www prefixed to their URL. Is it required or more importantly will SEO be improved if the www is dropped. In short my answer is yes, there are several advantages all related to SOE and Keyword optimization for removing www from your blogs or websites URL, and very few if any reason to leave it there. So let’s look at why www is simply evil for SOE and Key phrase optimization: When Google and other search engines analyze a webpage, one of the most important attributes it looks at is keyword or key phrases, this includes your URL. When it comes to a URL the following rules a taken into account: Words or Phrases closer to the left side of URL rank higher. For example a blog about Making Money Online , with a URL of www.MakingMoneyOnline.com Google will recognize the www as the first and highest value keyword in the page followed by Making then Money and finally Online . So shortening the URL to MakingMoneyOnline.com the Key Phrase Making Money Online is closer to the beginning of the URL, and will rank higher in returned search results for the key Phrase Making Money Online Shorten your URL It is also important at a page or article level to include the key phrase in the html, htm, or aspx document name, but it is known that Google only analyze the first XX number of characters in a URL so for a long URL such as http://www.MyBlog.com/blogs/archive/20008/05/03/A-Blog-Post-About-WWW-And-Keyword-optomization.aspx there is a chance that the part of URL at the end that contains the Key phrase i.e. A-Blog-Post-About-WWW-And-Keyword-optomization.aspx may get may get cut off. This is another good reason not to have www at the beginning of your URL. Placing unnecessary prefixes like www to the beginning of a URL does not end with the www, care needs to be taken when placing anything at all before your domain name, and this includes words such as forum and gallery as in the following examples forums.NetMoneyFAQ.com and gallery.NetMoneyFAQ.com Many users will automatically append www to any URL address, so it’s important you have DNS and host header entries setup to redirect and accept URLs that have been appended with www, but in my opinion for best Keyword and phrase optimization your primary URL should be promoted and internal links should not include a www. Read More...