I remember reading ages ago that it's a good idea to choose either www.domain.com or domain.com as your main URL and then set the other one as a 301 redirect to point to your domain?The reason provided was:Some people may link to www.domain.comOther links may point to domain.comIn order to not lose 'SEO link juice', the individual recommended setting up a 301 redirect from one to the other.Has this changed? Is it true? I would have guessed that Google (and other search engines) would be smart enough to whack some code in their algorithm to understand that in most cases www.domain.com = domain.com?
SEO/link-juice implications of 'www.' links versus links without 'www.'
seo;301 redirect;no www
The main reason to redirect no-www to www (or the contrary) is to avoid duplicate content issues and not to avoid losing link juice. If you don't apply a 301 redirect, Google is going to index both versions of your website and will identify duplicate content (bad for SEO for sure).Moreover, you can choose 301 redirect instead of rel=canonical to avoid to lose link juice but just few of webmasters or users will be wrong on putting your URL on their websites.