WWW or non-WWW : Which is preferred for SEO????

Everyone confused which version WWW or non-WWW is better for SEO? 

There is no significant difference between WWW and non-WWW however they are different little bit in technical aspect. It's a completely personal preference whether to use WWW or non-WWW for your site and google does canonicalization to decide which URL is better if several no. of URLs pointing to the same resource.

WWW vs non-WWW : Difference

WWW in front of  acts site's URL acts as  host name which can help you with flexibility in DNS. WWW have CNAME(Cannonical Name) records. If your site is small and there is only few millions of page views per month then there is no problem with non-WWW version also. But if your website is massive large and there is millions of page views per day, then WWW is preferred over non-WWW because WWW deploy redundant hosts to restrict cookies. 

Google doesn't preferred particular version however it depends on your personal  preference. You can use Google Search Console to set preferred version  of your website URL and can use 301 redirection to redirect one version to another which is beneficial for SEO. However, when people search particular websites most of them entered WWW although this trend is changed in recent stats. I have checked the WWW and non-WWW trend of Google in 2016 which is shown in  below info graphs.

Since, people searched more WWW than non-WWW then obviously WWW has mnemonics advantage over the naked domain names.

Google Increases the Width of SERP Column

Google recently made a major change to search result column which may have great impact on search results appearance. Significant increase in the width of the column of SERP , impacting everything google displays in that column.

Feature snippets, Ad Words, Local listing as well as organic search results are impacted by this new change.

Google has increased the column for search results by 100 pixels from 500 to 600 pixels. The amount of white space between the results and the feature in right side bar has decreased from 65 Pixels to 60 only.

It is great news for those who is disappointed when google changed search results to display 4 ads at the top of result pages. Due to decrease in height of many features in column , some organic results pushed up on the pages based on the search query.

Previously maximum 55-60 characters titles consider as a  very good but with changing in width of search results page 70 characters title is allowed. Now you need to limit with  meta description length which is increased by 16-20 characters. Width of featured snippets is also increased by 46 pixels wider than the regular search results page while height is decreased significantly. Width of Local map packs are also increased and the new packs are same dimension as the Featured snippets. The width of right hand column such as Google knowledge panel are still the same and not adjusted .