Editor’s note: “Ask an SEO” is a weekly column by technical SEO expert Jenny Halasz. Come up with your hardest SEO question and fill out our form. You might see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post!

Welcome to another edition of Ask an SEO! Here’s our SEO question for the week:

WWW or no WWW: should I use www in my URL – or not? Is either more preferable for SEO or to search engines?

Google has no preference for whether you use www or not. As you can see from this tweet, John Mueller agrees:

yep — 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 3, 2017

What you should consider, though, is that switching back and forth between www and no www is not wise. It can create confusion for the search engines and duplicate content if one version is not redirected to the other.

So choose one, and stick with it.

It’s easy to set your preferred domain using Google Search Console.

If you decide later you want to make a change, that’s not a big deal; just make sure all of your redirects are set up appropriately and that you change your internal links.

My own site (jlh-marketing.com) has been on non-www since its inception. Last month, I changed it to www, after making sure to get all of my redirects correct. I have seen no change in SEO as a result.

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Featured Image: Image by Paulo Bobita