Strange Web Address

what to make of a www.www.

[thnkfst]

Hello,

I'm usually just a lurker and not a poster...

I'm wondering if anyone can tell me why on a server that I host a few of my websites on, why my sites are actually showing up with www.www.websitename.com?. (It's even been crawled this way, but really I haven't investigated further.)

It's actually more than just my website showing up this way, even other websites that I know who have the same host.

It seems very strange and not something I have ever seen.

Are there any explainations for this?
Is this a bad thing?

Any explainations would be appreciated.

Jen

[Dijkgraaf]

So your domain actually resolving when it is like that?
If so it sounds like your domain has been set up with wild card subdomains, and so it is treating the second www as a subdomain, but pointing it at your main web site.
So no harm done apart from the weird looking URL.

Either the URL submitted to the search engine was in that form, or it found a link to the site somewhere like that.
If the particular search engine in question allows you to find backlinks, you can always search for www.www.websitename.com and see if you find any such links.

[digitalv]

Curious, does it work if you only type "DOMAIN.COM" without the WWW prefix? It looks like someone at your host screwed up when making the DNS entry.

Instead of creating the root as "domain.com" and creating an A record for "www", they created the root as "www.domain.com" and still created the A record for WWW. That's why www.domain.com and www.www.domain.com would work.

[Dijkgraaf]

You might want to do a lookup on
domain.com
www.domain.com
and
www.www.domain.com
and see if they all resolve to the same IP address.

[thnkfst]

Thanks for the input here. First off, the only reason why I discovered this was because I accidently typed in www two times one day.

So your domain actually resolving when it is like that?

If resolving means when you type it into the browser - yes the domain or a few more than just my domain does show up like that.

Previously I only thought there were domains such as www2. etc.

And I guess since all of these sites are set up with cms, there was a link found somewhere with the www.www.

If the particular search engine in question allows you to find backlinks, you can always search for www.www.websitename.com and see if you find any such links.

I'm seeing this occurrance in two search engines so far.

Curious, does it work if you only type "DOMAIN.COM" without the WWW prefix?

yes the search still comes up with the www.www. at least on my domain name, and nobody elses so far. But with the www.www. there is only one entry spidered, and only with my domain name.

I think the key here is knowing it is a cms based system, which I update basically daily, thus it gets spidered upon updates. I'm sure these two factors have to do with why this occurs.

I'm not going to dwell on this since you guys think its not damaging. Just strange to me that a mistake in typing made all of this happen. (I'd say about 2 weeks ago or less.)

thanks again,

Jen