Crawling & indexing

Choosing between www and non-www consistently

By Benchmark Enterprise Systems, LLC · Published

Reviewed by Ryan Schober · 2026-10-09

Approved by Ryan SchoberEditorial review · 2026-10-09

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The direct answer

Either hostname can work. The practical issue is whether links, redirects and preferred URLs agree on one public version.

A practical check

Compare the homepage, location pages, sitemap and canonical tags. Watch for a second hostname serving independent content instead of forwarding to the preferred version.

Choosing the next step

Select the approved hostname and align generated URLs and redirect rules. Preserve path and query context where needed so a request does not lose its intended destination.

Further reading

Platform guidance can change. Consult the current official documentation before making platform-specific changes.

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