chinook - 7:51 pm on Jan 3, 2004 (gmt 0)

This topic actually raises a very good point. Most hosting companies automatically set up a site to respond with
example.com and www.example.com, I think this has been somewhat of a historical practice.

Consider the situation of:
www.example.com
www2.example.com
www3.example.com
usa.example.com
canada.example.com

Each of the above could point to a separate site, all it takes is a dns entry that then points where it needs to.

I suspect people think that www as the first part has some special significance when in fact it is not treated any differently than www2 or the other "host" names.

Now since googlebot could see www.example.com and example.com as being "potentially" two sites which have the same content, this could contribute towards a duplicate content count. Too much duplicate content and well you know what happens.

There seems to be two choices:
1. Set up your site with only 1 host (host header) ie www
2. redirect one of them (301 redirect)(your hosting company should be able to assist you with this)