www2 & www3

[sallam]

I just noticed that my site can be reached from www, www2 ad www3
But in 2 and 3 its slower, and my link unit bar is showing empty, while in www its showing links as normal.

what are those www2 and www3? are they specific to server dns settings?
and whats the difference between them and the usual www?

[Stefan]

I'll bump this up and guess at an answer.

I think your server might be responding to all subdomains with example.com. It's the same way servers will automatically deliver both www and non-www on either request. I suspect that this isn't good for you (canonical), so you might want to check into it.

If I have this wrong, perhaps some others can contribute.

[sallam]

You are right. I asked my host and they said they use a wildcard in the web server config, so that anything.domain.com would lead to my domain.com.
But why is it bad? and what is 'canonical'?
Should I ask my host to delete the wildcard subdomain?

[Stefan]

Canonical in this case refers to Search Engines finding the same page with different URL's, such as with and without a www on the front. They then think you have more than one version of the page and you can have problems because of duplicate content. It is best to have every page only appear with one URL. Whether this is with or without the www is up to you and depends on what version most of your best inbound links are using. There are ways to fix things, such as forcing non-www requests to www (or visa versa) using htaccess in Apache. It can be helpful also if you use absolute internal links (with h*tp://), rather than relative. Otherwise, if someone links to your homepage without the www, the bots will follow that in, then find your internal links, and think all your pages have no www (along with the ones it already knows about with the www). The use of the base tag can take care of it, if the links are relative, but I'm not familiar with the use of it, as I use absolute links, so I can't advise you on that. Doing some Google "site:www.webmasterworld.com whatever" searches will find more info.