www vs. Non-www?

The problem is that www is considered a sub-domain, just like: http://mail.yahoo.com or http://analytics.google.com.

Search engines consider subdomains to be a completely different web site. So, http://www.dauclair.com is a completely different site than http://dauclair.com in Google’s eyes.

This affects your SEO in two areas:

1. If Google happens to index your site as both www and non-www, you may be penalized for duplicate content. Your site is essentially competing against itself.
2. Google determines your PageRank, the importance of your site, by the number of inbound links your site has. So, if people are linking to www, but your site is indexed as non-www, you are missing out on all the inbound links pointing to your www site.

By default, most web servers will redirect both www and non-www to your main web site. This is why most sites work by typing either. However, as web developers and SEOs, we have the flexibility to disable or change this behavior on the apache web-server using redirect rules in the .htaccess file or the main server-auth files.

When I started building inbound links to dauclair.com, I used non-www. I chose this because the URL is shorter. Now, I think that it was a mistake. When other webmasters or just people referencing the site post a link, they naturally assume to use www since that is the standard way they see it on tv, the internet and other forms of advertising. They are not looking out for SEO best interests.

Any thoughts on this? Otherwise, its www from here on out.