www in URLs

What difference does it make whether the URL of a page includes the "www" part or not? Does that hamper the Google Spider's crawling process?

Just to make it clearer, I mean the difference between
http://www.techzonez.com and http://techzonez.com

The reason I'm asking is because I've recently added a few pages to my personal site. I browsed through these newly added pages to check everything was fine. But after a certain point, the "www" would no longer appear in the address bar (although I do not remember doing anything differently when I created those web pages).

After a couple weeks, when I went to check if Google had indexed my new pages, I found that it had stopped indexing the pages from the point where the "www" no longer appeared in the URLs. Is it a coincidence or should I wait longer and see what happens?

Even if it's no problem, can you tell me how to get back the "www" into all of my pages' URLs? I want it to be consistent throughout the site.

Google spiders the content and doesn't necessarily look for links.

With or without the "www" shouldn't make any difference to the spider as long as the links point to a true destination they will still be indexed.

What script are you using for your site?

Is there a setting within it where you have specified the home domain.

A lot of the links in our front page menu do not need to be scripted with the techzonez.com domain in the urls because we have a global setting in virtua news where we can set the homepage url and this is then parsed into the pages. vBulletin works the same way.

for example:
our polls page is http://www.techzonez.com/polls.php but because we have already set the homepage,it is scripted in the menu as just polls.php. It is then parsed automatically so that the user sees the full url.

You might want to try the Poodle Predictor and compare the results for pages with and without the "www"

Poodle Predictor

Quote:

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Poodle predictor is a tool that attempts to give you an idea of how your site will show up in the search-engine results, before it's too late, and they have already cached it.
This helps you avoid making mistakes that will either prevent your site from getting a decent listing, or will show a useless description of you site in the search-engine results.
To do this, we have attempted to replicate the rules used by the main search-engines, as they spider your site.
Naturally they are not all identical, and they don't make their search algorithms publicly available, so Poodle predictor's results will never be identical with the search-engines results.

Poodle predictor comprises several different components:

Poodle predictor's Spider view
Poodle predictor's Diagnostics view
Poodle predictor's Source-code view

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Thanks for the replies, Rev. I read them at school but couldn't reply because I wasn't logged in.

The Poodle Predictor did a good job. It seems I was being a bit impatient; Google has indexed all my pages.

I also found out a way to force the "www" to appear.

I was linking to a folder (not a page). e.g. http://www.techzonez.com/forums/
This way the URL would've turned into "http://techzonez.com/forums/" when viewed in the browser.

But if I link to a page, the "www" appears.
e.g. http://www.techzonez.com/forums/index.php

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Reverend

A lot of the links in our front page menu do not need to be scripted with the techzonez.com domain in the urls because we have a global setting in virtua news where we can set the homepage url and this is then parsed into the pages. vBulletin works the same way.

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I guess it's the same in my case; if I want to link to my software page for example, I only use "software.htm". All my pages have worked fine until I tried to link to a folder, which is when I noticed the "www" was disappearing.