In Google, why do different results show when using www.abcexample.com vs. abcexample.com without the www?

[Search Circus]

In checking a client's number of incoming/inbound links in Google, why do different number of results appear when typing link:www.abcexample.com versus link:abcexamaple.com without using the www portion? For example, using this client's site, 0 results appear in Google when typing link:www.abcexample.com versus 602 results appear when typing link:abcexample.com without the www part. BTW, this client is one of the largest in the world for its industry and its website has been around since Websites have been around years ago, if that makes a difference from an SEO standpoint at all.

[...lost]

hmmm. email them and ask.

[mohamadazmath]

basically they have their own algorithms for basic checks...so when you type http://www.abc... algorithm find that you are checking for website clarification but not about the website informaton...as abcexample.com....

[dwightl.geo]

i believe it's because some people in their html source code put urls in their links like below

<a href="
http://abcexamaple.com
">ABC</a>

<a href="
http://www.abcexamaple.com
">ABC</a>

[linkme2mrseo]

If some had been promoting both versions or used the non www version in the site to link pages together you will run into a problem. You should all have backlinks to the www version. If you have links or PR to the non www version you need to do a permanent re-direct from it to the www version.

The are basically to seperate urls. You need to only check and promote one.

[Irish1952]

The difference is because there are some matches that contain exactly http://www.abcexample.com and others that simply contain abcexample.com. I learned this from searches where I inadvertently spelled a word wrong, and there have been websites that had that same word misspelled the same way that I had.

[memetrader]

The answer is that http://www.domain.com is a different url to domain.com.

This is a domain 'mydomain.com'. This is a sub-domain 'www.mydomain.com' and so is this 'anything.mydomain.com'. A server could return completely different content for any of these urls so search engines have to treat them as separate individual urls.

In your case you need to 301 redirect the 'www' url to the 'non-www' url.

Also don't bother with Google's link command because they only show a sample of the links they know about. Use the Yahoo search command linkdomain:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

Yes it can make a difference from the SEO point of view because inbound links will count only towards the url they are pointing to. If you do a 301 redirect they will count towards the redirected url.

If you don't follow email me and I will expand.