One concern amongst new bloggers is whether or not to use the www extension on their site. (i.e. http://www.blogresourcesonline.com or http://blogresourcesonline.com). This is a matter of personal preference and either address will work fine in the blogosphere.

However, consistency is very important. You want your pages to be indexed by the search engines consistently. The search engines need to understand that www.yoursite.com is the same as yoursite.com. This way you will get “credit” for all links coming to either address.

I did not fully understand this when I first set up my blogs. But through trial and error I have come up with a methodology that should make this type of consistency happen.

1. First, check and see if your blog is set up with or without the www prefix. Go to your WordPress options page. Under the general tab you will see your WordPress address and your Blog address. Are these www. or not? I do not recommend changing either of these since this is how your blog is referenced. If there is no www prefix there then I would just go without it. If it is there then that is fine also. My blog is setup without the www prefix.
2. Second there is a plugin called enforce-www-preference. Upload this to your plugins folder and activate it. This will permanently redirect (301 redirect) traffic to whatever address you have set up in your WordPress options as I mentioned in Step 1 above. So, for example, with my site you will now see that whether you type in http://www.blogresourcesonline.com or http://blogresourcesonline.com only http://blogresourcesonline.com (without the www prefix) shows up in the address bar.
3. Third, go to your Google Webmaster Tools account. Click on Tools and you will see “Set Preferred Domain”. Here you can indicate whether your Pages in the Google Directory should be displayed with or witout the www. prefix. I would set this to agree with the way your blog is set up in your WordPress General Options (as I discussed in Step 1 above). For Blog Resources Online the preference is without the www prefix. Google will now attempt to display all of your pages using your preferred preference which may take some time. It is my opinion that this step is what caused my pages to become de-indexed for a short period of time. But, thankfully, I am once again showing up in Google.
4. Finally, your Google sitemap should be submitted using the preferred domain that you set up in Step 3 above. I use the Google XML Sitemaps version 3.0b8 plugin. Once you activate the plugin, in WordPress go to Options. Then click the XML-Sitemap choice. Scroll all the way down and you will see a heading called “Location of your Sitemap File”. Mine is set for “automatic detection” and I think, especially for beginners, it is best to leave it this way. I believe the address and prefix feed off of your WordPress general preference as outlined in Step 1 above. When you submit this sitemap to Google, the prefix should agree with your preferred domain that you set up in Step 3 above or you will get an error. If you follow the steps that I have outlined here then I believe that this should not be an issue.

If anyone has more input on this issue, please leave a comment. Many people can benefit from your experiences.