new site do I drop www?

[toddb]

I am starting a new site and I noticed that a lot of big sites are dropping the WWW. I am also seeing more none WWW referrals in my other sites. Since google seems to not give the same PR to the WWW as the none WWW, it would seem to make good sense to avoid the WWW now. I could specify that in trade requests etc. Does anyone else see this as the on going trend or am I too early with this?

[pixel_juice]

Most users will expect, and continue to expect the www. and it's wise to give people what they expect.

If you really want to drop it, just make sure you also set up http*//www.site.com to 301 redirect to http*//site.com in order that you don't lose traffic or links.

[rfgdxm1]

Google should merge these together if they point at the same data.

[toddb]

type ins would still find www.mysite but all trades and links would just be mysite.

[rfgdxm1]

If you insist, redirect the www subdomain to root.

[toddb]

Gotcha thank you.

[DavidT]

Best to decide at the beginning. I moved to redirecting www to no www after a few months of site being up because G was listing my root page twice on the same serp page, once with www once without.

Deep Crawl has no problem with the redirect but Fresh just doesn't get it. Day after day it comes requesting pages with the www and not following the redirect except with robots.txt.

[steveb]

Of sites that give me a link without me asking I'd say 90%+ make it with the www. There is no reason to not use the www so you might as well use it.

[rfgdxm1]

Good point steveb. The issue is most people expect website addresses to begin with www. Logically this is stupid, but for historical reason it is that was, so best to go with the flow.

[NotePad]

be carefull with redirects, i'm not sure of the accepted way to redirect but i had a site temporarilly banned for having a 1 second meta redirect.

[DavidT]

<be carefull with redirects, i'm not sure of the accepted way to redirect but i had a site temporarilly banned for having a 1 second meta redirect.>

This is how i'm redirecting:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^mysite\.com
RewriteRule ^.*$ [mysite.com%{REQUEST_URI}...] [R=301,L]

I don't see how this could be a reason for a penalty or why some crawlers can't understand it or can't be bothered following it.

[rfgdxm1]

So long as it is done properly by the server, this shouldn't cause a penalty.

[buckworks]

I like to promote my sites without the the www. and omitting it has caused no known problems.

A redirect helps to keep the www. version from getting into circulation, and I've always found that other webmasters are nice about setting the link up without the www. -- even Yahoo.

[NexDog]

Most hosts set up WWW in the domain's dns zone file. Some use an A record, we use a CNAME. As long as the entry is there, your site is accessible on either. As it is contained with a domain's dns, it is not treated as a redirect or subdomain. With this configuration, I highly doubt that Google will penalise thinking it's a rediect.

[vmaster]

Better stick with the www. We had this problem a while ago - most webmasters providing incoming links would add the www anyway, causing unnecessary hassle.

[pixel_juice]

>>Fresh just doesn't get it. Day after day it comes requesting pages with the www and not following the redirect except with robots.txt.

I reckon there's at least one link to you with the www. that freshbot is coming across on it's crawls. 301 redirect like I said in the second post and Fresh will soon get the idea.

[drunhaar]

New to the forum here and am very impressed. On to business...

I'm trying to figure out if there is a difference between using a 301 redirect and using CNAME. We have multiple domains (different ips) that point to our real site using CNAME.

When I plug in one of the redirecting urls to a search engine simulator it returns content from the real page. Is this seen as duplicate content (penalized by Google)? There are no links to the other urls.

TIA for any help/suggestions!
Dan

[killroy]

drunhaar> Yup, I had the same thing on my site. I have a main domain, and then a bunch of "second choice" domains that aren't really used. I set them up with records pointing to the same server, and now they're PR0 pernalised. luckily google still ranks the main domain properly (sometimes I wonder how it knows which one that is).

now I 301 redirect, and will always do so, cos, face it, most commercial sites ahve a bunch of domains ("second choice") set up for them.

SN