After much web surfing, I was unable to find statistics on www vs. non www usage but I would be willing to bet the number is quite high. I took a very informal poll of 15 of my techie friends consisting of web developers, designers and marketing pro’s all but one said they almost always don’t use the www, when typing in a web address. If your career site is not configured to display without the “www” a user will get an error message and in my opinion, that’s not a good first impression.
Best Practice for Search Engine Visibility
When talking about website usability and candidate experience, it is best practice to ensure your career website is configured to display with or without the www.
I'm not claiming to be a DNS expert by any means as I'm sure there are technical reasons I am unaware of that makes it difficult to configure all web servers to work with or without the “www”. But, generally speaking if your site does not work without the “www” it means that your hosting provider forgot to configure it or didn’t see the need.
Remember to 301 Redirect
Once you configure your career site correctly, make sure that you’ve set up a 301 redirect for the non www version of your career site to avoid confusing the search engines.
In other words, when someone types in http://careerwebsite.com your site would actually go to http://www.careerwebsite.com/ (See below)
Google Webmasters – Set Preferred Domain
If you’re like me, running a blog on the blogger platform aka blogspot, I don’t think there’s a way to set up a 301 redirect. In that case you’ll want to tell Google what your preferred domain is within their webmaster section screen shot Doing this will help Google improve how they crawl and index your site.
Do both, if you can
As a 7 year experienced search marketing strategist, I always way on the side of being safe rather sorry so when it comes to working on client sites and ensuring they have optimal SEO visibility, I always recommend doing both - Setting up proper redirects as well as telling Google what your your preferred domain is.
