WWW or not WWW, what to choose as the main site name?

Question

From a technical point of view, the only problem is traffic and incoming links (one of them should be redirected to the other).

Now I need to choose which one should be primary. Some sites have www (google, microsoft, ruby-lang), and some without www (stackoverflow, github). It seems that the newbie is not using WWW.

What to choose?

Please explain a few options.

UPDATE: This is a programming related question. In fact, the site is intended for programmers, so I expect to see what theists think.

UPDATE: A site without WWW is the clear winner. Thanks guys!

Answer 1

It doesn't matter what you choose, but you have to choose one and be consistent. This is more a matter of style, but it’s important to note that search engines consider these two URLs to be different sites:

http://www.example.com
http://example.com

So, whichever you choose for aesthetic reasons, you should consistently use SEO reasons.

Edit: My personal opinion is to give up www , because it seems archaic to me. I also like shorter urls. If it depended on me, I would redirect all traffic from www.example.com to example.com .

Answer 2

Do not use www. This is an unnecessary twister language and a pain in the ass for graphic designers.

Answer 3

There are some issues you should consider. See For example Use uncertified domains for components for problems with the validity of cookies.

But no matter how you decide: use only one of these domains as your canonical domain name and use 301 redirects to fix the invalid. For the Apache web server, you can use mod_rewrite to do this.

Answer 4

Set up both, obviously. I would redirect www to a regular URL, since it exists only so that the people who usually enter it at the beginning of each address are still happy. Just do not do whatsoever you do, you need to enter www manually. Someday.

Answer 5

It depends on your audience, I think. A non-technical audience will assume that www exists, while a technical audience will not instinctively expect this and will appreciate shorter URLs.

( Change ). I recently set up a domain for my family, including webmail. My wife asked what the web address is. I said "mail.ourdomain.com". printed "www.mail.ourdomain.com".)

In any case, make sure that the one you are not using uses purely 301 Redirects to the one you are doing - then neither users nor the search engines would care.

Answer 6

I would redirect without www. In Apache 2.x:

 RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yourdomain\.com$ RewriteRule (.*) http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=Permanent] 

I think www does not make sense; we all know that we are on the world wide web. It would be much better to use subdomains for load balancing or for device-specific sites (for example, m.google.com for mobile phones, for example, although there is now a top-level domain .mobi).

Answer 7

One aspect of this issue concerns the CDN and some web hosts (e.g. Google Sites). Such hosts require you to add a CNAME record for your site name, which points to host servers. However, because of how DNS is designed, CNAME records cannot coexist with other records for the same name, such as NS or SOA records. Thus, you cannot add a CNAME for your example.com name and instead add a CNAME for the subdomain. Of course, people usually choose www for their subdomain.

Despite this technical limitation, I prefer to skip www on my sites where possible.

Answer 8

www is used as a standard subdomain subfolder for websites in the primary domain.

http://no-www.org/ try to obsolete it.

Though http://www.w3.org/ includes www.

It is worth checking both of these sites.

Now it seems to be a matter of taste and a problem of religion, not a standard. No matter what you choose, make sure that you are registered or redirected from www as Control + enter, etc. copy shortcuts to www.

Answer 9

Do you have other subdomains? If this is the case, this may make www use more reasonable, as some locations may have different subdomains used for other purposes, such as storage or internationalization subdomains.

Answer 10

I usually visit www.sitename.com because it is clear that this is the main part of your site. Testing.sitename.com is testing. House.sitename.com is my home computer. I like to be explicit, but I don't mind when sites do not use www. I'm not the cleanest. :)

Answer 11

Use without www. . The main rationale for this is that since you write the address in a web browser, it already implies that you are accessing the website (what else would you do with the browser?) - so using an additional www is useless.

To be specific, when you receive an HTTP request, you know that the user wants to access the website. The web browser adds the http: // - header implicitly, so the user only needs to worry about this address. The same applies to other services - if you host ftp, just point the ftp client to a domain without ftp. -prefix.

If I understand correctly, the reasons for using different subdomains are www., Ftp. etc. they are mostly historical and are no longer relevant these days, since traffic is simply directed to the correct server / service - redundant prefixes are simply stuck due to their popularity.

Answer 12

I always do un-www with one redirect to www and refer to them as www.mysite; Think of the various forums and instant messaging applications that correctly convert links only when they start with www ..

Answer 13

You want your URL to be unforgettable, and you want Google and others to register the same URL for ranking, etc.

Calling www is the best practice, but HTTP always redirects it to a version other than www. Thus, search engines know how to rank links to both options as the same site.

Answer 14

No matter what you use, stick to one or you will need to make 2 sets of cookies for each domain so that your sessions / cookies work correctly.