http and www + domain: good or not?

[Ellen C Braun]

When I put up a link to my site, do I want to write:

http://www.mydomain.com

or

http://mydomain.com

or

www.mydomain.com

or

mydomain.com


I know that technically all of those are different domains, and link juice is diluted by using all 4 versions. (Am I correct on this point?)

If so, which format is best?

And how can I put up a 301 redirect for all the others- and is that a good idea?

So many questions- thanks!

[Clay Franklin]

Just use one or the other.
without http:// is does not provide a link that is clickable
I have been using no www on my blogs and it works fine.
I tried changing from no www to with www and it really messed things up lost page rank and stuff like that.
Most people in the know will suggest for new sites to include the www.
a few others will say with a shorter url it is better for twitter. (ie no www)
The links to your site will be to one or the other.
I have some links to http://www.mysite and most to http://mysite.com,
is it a web site or blog?
If it is a blog their is a redirect for you already I beliee it is a 307 yet that is what I am using and it works great.
Just stick to one or the other and keep going.

[Ellen C Braun]

Thanks, Clay!

I get a lot of inbound links from others- is there one way or the other that is better in this regard? Meaning, which way would people (not IM people) be more likely to post a link? - then I can follow that strategy!

[cindybidar]

Something that may or may not be of concern to you, but I found it interesting...when doing some article marketing for a client I found out his articles were being rejected because the link in the resource box was a redirect. I was using the www version and his host is redirecting the www url to the one without (as does mine). Just FWIW.

[Clay Franklin]

In general most people add www to links.
It is the preferred way according to my DMIS teacher.
I already had all my links build without the www at my blog. Most word press blogs do not have www since that is the default setting in WP. Most web sites do have WWW. Most major bloggers use www and it is recommended by Jerry West and Lynn Terry.
BobtheTeacher does not suggest it since it just makes the URL longer.
Twitter does not have it Google, Facebook and Yahoo do.

If just starting out probably fine to go with www
If already established use what you have.
May people linking to you will go to your site to get the URL so it is not mistyped.

[wade_watson]

Cindy, your client needs to check his host control panel. Mine, Dreamhost, lets you set the site up to either show www or not. The article site he submitted to must not have been Ezine Articles, because I've had my own redirects accepted there OK.

[TraciKnoppe]

I do not use www in my links, same reason as Bob, it makes the URL longer. I use canonical URLs so if someone where to type in www, it directs them to my site without them. Canonical URLs the SEO friendly way to dictate to search engines which version of your page is the one that should be indexed.

SEOmoz has a good article on canonical URLs.

[cindybidar]

Wade, I didn't have a problem with any of the other article directories, either. Wish I could remember which one it was...it was one of the big boys, because we only submit to 6 or 8 directories.