Duplicate Pages / Website

What is the correct way to set up a Domain Name for WordPress:

aerospaceguide.net or http://www.aerospaceguide.net

I looked around in search engines and most websites seem to have www. in the front.
For SEO I think www. might be better. Not sure.

A few days ago I changed the settings page in WordPress for:

WordPress Address (URL): from aerospace guide.net to http://www.aerospaceguide.net
and Site Address (URL): from aerospace guide.net to http://www.aerospaceguide.net

It seems to work from that page. Is it better to use wp-config.php method?
Reason I am saying that today I tried to look up my website via mobile and the message ‘Website has a Redirect Loop’, but somehow still got to the AeroSpaceGuide.net Homepage.

Is that what you were trying to achieve to stop duplicate page?

Also when I first created the website I used Frontpage and many people linked to ASG via

http://www.aerospaceguide.net/index.html

At the moment a message comes up: Ooops… Error 404.
Is there a way to send it to the homepage:
http://www.aerospaceguide.net

I await your reply,

Vic Stathopoulos

Most common method now is without the www, as it’s technically redundant (it means “world wide web”) — it used to be more necessary when there was anonymous FTP (e.g., http://ftp.myname.com), or funky mobile sites like mob.mysite.ttt etc.

So, you just need to pick one or the other, set it to “resolve” to just the one version, which you can setup with your A NAME/CNAME records on server, etc.

and then only ONE version should have working canonical tags in the meta to say which one is the “official” one, and anything else is duplicate so go to the real one.

Also, in dem olden days, SSL/https only worked right with www – which some sites are still doing (eg., https://www.amazon.com/ ).

Neither version is better nor worse for anything as TLD not used for SEO, according to Google, so as long as both work, but only one is the canonical, use whichever you like best (if your server only supports www for https then go with www).

I changed it to www. by adjusting it in the settings general page in WordPress. Is that alright?

I don’t know to do it server method – I am not that technical.

Is the method I adjusted achieving the same thing?

Regards,

Vic