WWW address Question

Assistance greatly appreciated

[Fbase21]

I have recently submitted my site to different places online (indexes and engines )
The other night I noticed google picked my site up - I am confused though about the way i am coming up in their engine

STEP A
If i go to google search and i type in just my business name without the www. or .com prefix and suffix (it brings up the results and the top one I see is for what appears to be my main listing) - The only catch is that when i click on it i am taken to my site at a web address [NAME.com...] without the www. - This also happens if i type in the search my web adress with NAME.com suffix - the results show the same and take me to a page that has no www. in it

STEPB
Now if i type in www.NAME or www.NAME.com in the search bar I am taken to the results page - When i click on those i come up to my site with www.NAME.com

The only difference in the two listings is that STEP A brings up 4 other listings to my site where STEP B brings only the one - Now all the other listings go to the www. address except one -- This is a listing that i posted for free with my web host

It appears that he entered me in as [NAME.com...] and no www -- Apparently google picked this up and so did the engines attached to google

MY QUESTION
1- what is my true listing?

2 - Will this have any negative effect with link popularity

3 - Will this effect anything at all with google or anyone else ( esp how i am listed in the engine )

4 - Should it be changed

I know this is alot but there isnt much out there on this topic?

Try it out and see what happens

Any comments appreciated
Nathan

[thehittmann]

This happens when some other sites that you have asked to link to yours have given the link without the www. to compound your site pr type "http://name.com" and find the sites that are linking to you without the www and ask them if they could include this for you.

[Web Footed Newbie]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Fbase21.

Anything before NAME.com is considered a sub-domain.
Many companies use this, for example: products.NAME.com, service.NAME.com, etc.

The www is also a sub-domain. So your PageRank can be different for www.NAME.com versus NAME.com.

If you do a search for links on Google, the results may only show links to your site with a PR4 or higher. You may also use alltheweb to look for links which usually shows more results than G. Hopefully, you have a list of sites that link to you.

Go back to your link partners and make sure everyone is consistent in the way their links point to you - like hittmann says.

As for me, all my links point to widgets.com and not www.widgets.com. This way, if I want to use the www sub-domain in the future, I can separate my link partners ;).
HTH, WFN

[vrtlw]

The www is also a sub-domain

I have read this before many times on this board. It is actually more accurate to refer to this as a canonical of a hostname. WWW is not a subdomain, it is a canonical name, one machine can have multiple canonical names pointing to individual or multiple (round-robin) hostnames. Canonical is referred to much in the same way a subdomain and in essence setting them up are similar, but the following normally occurs.

Domain name (a record) = domain.com
Canonical (cname) = www.domain.com > domain.com
Canonical (cname) = ftp.domain.com > domain.com
Canonical (cname) = smtp.domain.com > domain.com

While ftp and www may or may not share the same hard disk drive space, they can surely not be reffered to as subdomains as these variable can be modified to point to the same directories, in truth they are canonical to the main domain name in most instances.

[PKfanSteph]

I have been having a similar problem...

When I go to www.mydomain.com/folder, I get transferred to mydomain.com/folder. This makes my site stats all confusing, not to mention the search engine listings. Is this something that can be fixed by me or my host? Or do I just need to live with it and add the mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com stats together myself?

[Rincewind]

This thread may be of interest
[webmasterworld.com...]
In short, it suggests using a 301 redirect to shift traffic from www.domain.com to domain.com. The point being that the search engines will then treat both domains as one so that a link to www.domain.com will also count toward the PR ot domain.com.

vrtlw is right that www.domain.com is not a subdomain. However, his reasoning is a bit out. It doesn't matter how you set up your nameserver and dns. Wither you call it a a-record or a cname. What makes it a domain or subdomain is wither that name is used for identifying a subdomain or a full domain. Strictly www.domain.com and domain.com are just two names for the same domain. Neither is a sub domain. I you have shared hosting, and run your mail account inside the same space as your web space (the norm for cpanel hosts) then your mail.domain.com will be a sub domain or domain.com because mail.domain.com is a name of a sub section of the domain.com domain. Also, mail.domain.com is a sub domain or www.domain.com because mail.domain.com is the name of a sub section of the domain www.domain.com. The actual name of the domain and the number of dots in it is not the determinator. It is whither the name is for a sub section of another domain or not.

[grandpa]

Well,

Let me just say thanks. I came in here today looking
for these answers.

<hm>..actually, only one of them :)</hm>

grandpa

[grandpa]

I wonder if I can get a clarification.

My link with www.domain.com has all of the PR. It
'seems' that I would want to set up a re-direct for
domain.com to point to www.domain.com.

However, it appears that most of what I've read
indicates the redirect should be the other direction...
www.domain.com to domain.com

Bottom line? The re-direct should point to the PR?

thanks
grandpa

[Rincewind]

The redirect should point to the most user friendly name for that domain. Since the www. bit is just extra typing for no gain, the best form of a domain would be simply domain.com. You should thus redirect traffic and hence PR form other forms of the name and to the simple domain.com form.

Bottom line:If google did not exist, what would you do? Well you would redirect form www.domain.com to domain.com. Not the other way round.