: Does www and non-www suffer duplicate content penalty? Do you know if I should use <link rel="canonical" tag, or 301 redirect from: http://example.com to http://www.example.com ...to avoid a

@Nimeshi995

John's answer is spot on however if your looking for advice which one is technically the best then the actual the answer is all 3 options.


SOURCE: Pro Webmasters Answer from John Conde


Do a 301 redirect to use the 'www' or no 'www'
Specify your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tool
Use canonical URLs (although it isn't typically used in this situation



And here's why...

Why 301 redirect URLs:

When you force users to use either www or non-www and they decide to reward your site with a backlink the next user who clicks that link does not need to go through a redirect.

While redirects nowadays are near instant they are additional server-side request that can be reduced if you have users linking to you correctly, which should be considered a good practice, especially if your site receives high volume of traffic.

Why canonical URLs

Nowadays it is considered a best practice to use canonical links, this is because duplicate content can appear in many different forms without factoring www and non-www. Blogs particularly will operate with pages being accessible via many different URLS for example:


/date/
/tag/
/author/


Using Canonical links correctly will insure that your content however it may be accessed is never marked as duplicate.

Why preferred domain in Google Console

It is a good practice to add all variations to Google Webmaster Tools so that you can confirm at any point that your site or Google is not doing anything it shouldn't be.


NON-SSL sites will have 2 variations
SSL sites will have 4 variations


You should seem something similar to this:



Adding a preferred domain in the process takes no more than a few seconds but in additional to 301 and canonicals this option is a great fallback just in case for some reason your 301's or canonical links stop working for one reason or more.

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@Pope3001725

If you don't specifically tell Google your preference you will probably have duplicate content issues. There is more then one way to inform Google of your preferred domain:


Do a 301 redirect to use the 'www' or no 'www'
Specify your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools
Use canonical URLs (although it isn't typically used in this situation)

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