Thread

It seems that by default, EE uses your domain name without the www.  Is there any reason to have the www., is it just personal preference?  I’d love to know if it does anything because it appears that I can add it back in if I need it.

I don’t know of any advantage to dropping the www, all I’ve ever made sure to do is to “make sure it works with and without the www”!

456 Berea St did an article on this recently:
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200802/make_sure_your_website_works_with_or_without_www/

It amused me to see how much some people care about this sort of thing:

http://no-www.org/
http://www.yes-www.org/

😊

It’s more related to your web host provider than anything else, but www. doesn’t have any real significance any more.

Thanks for the links…I’ve shortened my domain further and become perfectly http://no-www.org/ compliant. 😊

Thanks all for the assist!

Some comments and a method to standardize your site URL from John Gruber.

The important thing is to pick one—www or not—and use it consistently. Use redirection rather than rewriting to bring people from the “wrong” one to the “right” one, so that their browser knows which one you’re using.

Mixing and matching is a good way to end up with cookies that don’t work reliably and with reduced search engine ranking.

Personally I went with “no www”. But there’s one big point in favor of keeping “www”: you can’t get an SSL certificate (for https) for a bare domain name. You need something in front, and “www.” is as reasonable a thing as any to put in front. If you’re ever likely to have https services—selling stuff, for instance—you probably should seriously consider going with “www.”.

(It’s been a few years since I stumbled across the SSL certificate limitation. It’s possible that has changed since then. If so, I trust that someone will enlighten me.)

This is entirely my personal view, Doug, if you’re required to use a subdomain, why not use something meaningful?  The EE store uses ‘secure’ as the subdomain, and ‘store’ is also quite common.  My point is that it’s easy to pick something that is meaningful to your site and your users rather than use ‘www’ if you dislike it.

Incidentally, using a full URL in the target of the rewrite rule along with [R=Permanent] as indicated in the instructions I linked to addresses your rightful concern about browsers and user agents knowing where they are.  As for cookies, using a cookie domain in the form of “.example.com” (the dot in front is key) will allow your cookies to be read by all subdomains.

Hmm, I was always taught to alias them in the DNS and have it work both ways. In the 12 years I have had my site I have not seen any search engine problems related to this. In fact, it tends to solve problem because people linking or typing the URL in any fashion can get there.

Again, never done anything except in the DNS. But I could be wrong, for sure.

I have seen some major sites where it does not work without the www - and, wow, what confusion that causes among users!

handyman, the issue is that since www is a subdomain, many search engines, including Google, view them as two separate sites.  To prevent spammers from gaining better rankings through duplication, there are penalties built in for sites who have content that is an exact duplicate for another domain.  If your site is accessible with and without www (or any other subdomain) and serving the same content, there is a good chance that your rankings are having a measure of punitive calculation added.

Sound right, but my experience does not bear that out…..mainly the punitive part. Yes, they may pick up the www as separate, but to assume google is that stupid might be a stretch.

As “proof of concept”, when I google for hearth.com, the one without the www comes up first, the one with comes second…but google does not in any way mistake the two - they do not list all the chapters under the www one. Also, if you use the “more results from hearth.com” link, you get both hearth.com and http://www.hearth.com docs…and all in the same listing. No dups, etc.

Moreover, all of our readers constantly tell us we come up first in most related searches, which is backed up by the fact that 75% of our traffic is from search.

So while there may be some tech aspects, I don’t see how google and friend punish this. Maybe someone can find a google blog or webmaster doc (straight from the source) to confirm or deny this?

SEO is a whole ‘nother story, but IMHO that particular “industry” is largely a seller of snake-oil, but has been very successful at it. I have seen countless people ruin their google ratings by trying to improve them! Most of it is common sense.

I’m going to dig around on this one…..it’s always hard to separate the FUD from the facts.

Looks like Google addresses it here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=44231
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=44232

In their webmaster domain tools.

“Once you tell us the preferred domain for your site, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead. In addition, when we list your pages in the search results, we will take your preference into account when displaying the URLs.”

My guess is that even if you don’t do this, they can “see” the DNS. Can’t their crawler get DNS? I assume so.

They do make reference that it “may” change the indexing or crawling not to tell them, but again I think that is only in cases when it is not clear to their crawler.

“If you choose Don’t set an association, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages.”

Ah, reading the google tea leaves. I don’t see anywhere (yet) where they suggest redirects for it, etc.

I have been wondering why people dont use www anymore in their urls. here at EE and elsewhere.

can someone light me up why this is?

Cheers:
- Tuittu

Personal preference? It really does seem superfluous. Some argue it might be deprecated, even:

By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the ‘http://’ onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.

Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it.

Moving to “The Lounge”.

I don’t use www any more - less to type in. 😊 Personal preference.