Canonical URLs – Why Forgetting www Really DOES Matter
Most webmasters and SEOs these days understand that http://firstpagefitness.com and http://www.firstpagefitness.com are going to produce the same page. Smart SEOs know that this is not desirable for many reasons, including duplicate content and splitting up link popularity.
But even among the SEO elite, not everyone understands the history of this issue. Few ask the question, “Why do we even need www. in the first place”? Perhaps this short history lesson will help…
A long, long time ago (early 90′s) in a land far, far away (government and academia) the World Wide Web was just a small part of what is known today as “the Internet”. The fastest personal computers were based on the archaic 386 chip, which couldn’t handle much load and were very slow by today’s standard. Government and Academic computers were serving up their little part of “the Internet” but were forced to spread out the load across several servers. Each server had its own IP address. For instance, they might have ftp.theirsite.com on one IP address, www.theirsite.com on another, and mail.theirsite.com on another IP address.
Today’s computers can easily handle the ftp access, mail and website all on the same server. But because “the Internet” grew from this old system, the part that comes before the first . in the URL can still be something other than www, and it can still serve up a different page. Thus – http://firstpagefitness.com and http://www.firstpagefitness.com aren’t necessarily bound to be the same page and a search engine might have trouble figuring out that they are, in fact, the same thing as opposed to duplicate content or some other black hat trick.
In a no-so-distant algorithm update, Google took care of this problem… for the most part. But it is better safe than sorry in terms of duplicate content. However, the real reason you want to fix canonical URL issues (click here to learn how) is because it splits up your link popularity between multiple URL versions of the same page.
This goes for www.yoursite.com/index.html VS yoursite.com as well.
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