Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Absolutely. These are different subdomains - all you are doing is splitting the link popularity of your inbound links - www.example.com and example.com are treated just as differently as mail.example.com would.
The real hazard is that you are likely to end up with both versions of the same site spidered, which will create duplicate content conflicts.
All of my domains 301 redirect example.com to www.example.com
Adding - PD said it clearer!
I don't think it matters which version you choose; the important thing is to pick one and focus on it. You'll never get 100% consistency, but be as consistent as you can, both for your internal links and for any outside links you cultivate.
The www. vs non-www. variant isn't the only one to watch out for ... also watch out for differences like widgets.com vs. widgets.com/ (note the trailing slash) or widgets.com/index.html vs just widgets.com.
<a href="http://www.example.com/foo/bar.html>foo bar</a>
instead of
<a href="../foo/bar.html">foo bar</a>
1. Set up the 301 redirect in .htaccess to make your site resolve to the preferred version of your URLs. Your host should do this for you if you don't have enough access to do it yourself.
2. Make sure every link within your own control is consistent about pointing to your preferred version.
3. Make sure all future link requests highlight your preferred version, provide code snippets for your preferred version, etc.
4. Finally, as time permits, contact other webmasters to make a gracious request that they update their links to you. Tell them the exact page on their site where they're linking to you; don't make them hunt for it. You'll get more co-operation if you make things as easy as possible for others to do what you want. Some will update your link and some won't. Ask once, but don't worry about chasing anyone; your energy is better invested in new link development.
By the way, I just have a hunch that www.example.com might be better than example.com. Look how the major search engines do for their own domains (they use the www version, always), it seems better. But again it's only a hunch, I have not data to support it's more effective.
It isn't "better". Back in the early days the WWW subdomain was necessary because the web was just another protocol - and lots of domains had subdomains like ftp.example.com, archie.example.com etc.
However, the world wide web has become "the internet" and most sites no longer distinguish between www and non-www.
Eventually, I suppose it will all be robots searching robots and autoclicking through robotically generated ads and to generated content.
I guess as long as they still send us AdSense checks ;-)
Sorry for the aside :-)
But seriously, this is a very good question this thread -- once a culture gets stuck on something it is hard to adjust the mindset regardless of the technical matters until the next big thing comes along. The "www" prefix seems to have gotten there and it will be hard for peopel to shake it regardless of the merits. I think many are just going to type it in anyway so we might as well roll with it and maintain it as the primary (redirecting the non-www as you previously suggested)
Point well taken that it is hard to prepare for the ramifications of the potential scope of that next big thing. :-)
