There are some very strong SEO benefits to standardizing the links to your website by removing the “www” from your URLs:
- Preventions Google search engine penalties for duplicate content
- Less bandwidth usage if you have many links per page
- Shorter URLs
Removing the WWW from your page URLs can be done in your .htaccess file so you won’t have to go to every page of your website and remove the “www” from your links. But going forward, it’s best to never use the WWW in your links or marketing material, since the .htaccess file will create a redirect, and limiting the number of redirects is always a good thing.
The .htaccess Code
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
And if you’d prefer to use “www” in all of your URLs, you can use this code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Don’t forget to replace the “domain.com” text with your domain name! :-)