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WWW or not WWW, what to choose as primary site name?

From technical perspective the only issue is traffic and incoming links (one of them should redirect to another).

Now I need to choose which one should be primary. Some sites have www (google, microsoft, ruby-lang) and some without www (stackoverflow, github). Seems to me the newer do not use WWW.

What to choose?

Please with some explanations.

UPDATE: This is programming related question. Actually site is for programmers, so I expect to see what techy people think.

UPDATE: Site without WWW is clear winner. Thank you guys!

Solution

  • It doesn't matter which you choose but you should pick one and be consistent. It is more a matter of style but it is important to note that search engines consider these two URLs to be different sites:

    http://www.example.com
    http://example.com

    So whichever you choose for aesthetic reasons should be consistently used for SEO reasons.

    Edit: My personal opinion is to forgo the www as it feels archaic to me. I also like shorter URLs. If it were up to me I would redirect all traffic from www.example.com to example.com.