Solve The Problem of Mixing Links With www And Without www
It is a long standing method for webmasters to choose one url version, either www or non-www (for example: http://www.yourdomain.com & http://yourdomain.com) while link building. And there is a strong point to do so. Google gets confused with these two versions of the same url while crawling links. They can treat them as separate references to separate pages even if they point to same page actually. Here lies the danger of duplicate content. Besides it may take long time before Google merges these links. So your total number of backlinks gets reduced leaving you with a less PR score. So choose one version at the start & stick to it all the way to your link building.
But what about others who may link to your site? You can’t control what url they will use. But here comes Google Webmaster Tools to help you. Register your site there & verify it, if you haven’t done it already. Use Preferred domain option from the Settings page. Now whatever your link url may be, Google will treat & convert it to your preferred version if necessary while indexing. The current links that are already indexed will get modified when the pages containing them will get refreshed in Google search index. It may take a bit of time. But you don’t have to worry about it once you are done choosing. Let Google worry for you.
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