Link building to ROOT domain OR to WWW.?

[SEOisSEO]

Hello,

Here I come with one more 'sensitive' question, hoping that you SEO gurus could give some input on.

My title explains pretty much what I'm wondering about, but let me give you some short data.

I have from .htaccess file set that all traffic goes to WWW.mydomain.com. I know that it is 'better' for search engines not to have duplicate destinations as that can give decreased page rank because of 'double content'.  As for search engines  http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com is totally different domains.

Now wondering one thing: If I build a several thousands of backlinks at various sources, blogs, directories, web sites etc etc. - shall I link to domain ROOT or shall I include WWW prefix?

When looking at Moz Keyword Analysis for my domains, I can see a block about 'Linking Root Domains' and  'Page Linking Root Domains'.

But no 'www' variable (sub-domain) there.

As I have already set canonical part so everything shows with WWW on my website - what logic shall I use when building backlinks? How will search engine translate the link juice in regards I wrote above?

Thanks in advance, great forum!

[SEOisSEO]

Thanks

[ALLee]

Are all of your links directing to the www version? Then this is what would happen. If you've rel=canonical'ed to the www version, and build links to the non www version, you will essentially build all link juice to the non-www and redirect it to the www, in this process you lose some link juice like you do in 301 redirects.

[SEOisSEO]

When looking in OSE and entering non canonical version of domain, it returns error: 'No Data Available for this URL'.

It is only returning results for WWW version. So I'm kind of confused about the 'best' way to go...

Thanks.

[SEOisSEO]

Thanks for your answer.

So I will not lose any link gain strength if some links are still pointing to non canonical version of domain (without WWW)?

R.

[Atlanta-SMO]

Link to the www domain.  Although if you set canonical and all to www, you will be fine either way.

[ALLee]

You should definitely build it to the www. if that is your primary domain. The Moz Keyword Analysis only shows it without the www because of cosmetic purposes - it doesn't mean that the links were all built from non-www's. You can confirm this by looking at the inbound links tab.