Sitepoint Members,
Does the www in an address serve any functional purpose? I know that one should pick www or no wwww and stick with it, but if www has no function for servers communicating with servers and browsers, it’s just in the way for computers and browsers, isn’t it?
Chris
It’s not that it’s “in the way” as much as it’s just a relic from the old days and there’s not really any use for it anymore. I never use it.
Hy,
In some URL addresses I saw www2, I kno www came from Word Wide Web.
WWW2 and WWW3 are hostnames or subdomains, typically used to identify a series of closely related websites within a domain
I definitely won’t use www then.
In deciding on whether to use .html or .htm (I know their origins) for SEO, I decided not to decide by making sure my address (after the domain) for each page is longer than 65 characters. I read that Google stops reading addresses after 65 characters. ('Not sure if that includes or excludes the domian, I guess includes.)
Thanks for the help,
Chris
Why would you do that? If you’re on Apache just use mod_rewrite to make pretty URLs through redirection (IIS use web.config), then you won’t have to worry about file extensions as they’ll not show.
It’s pretty simple, if your page is mysite.com/contact.html, then use mod_rewrite to redirect the page to my site.com/contact/
RewriteRule ^contact/? contact.html [L]
Check the Sitepoint Apache forum or Google mod_rewrite for tons of examples.
Keep your names short and sweet so that people can remember and type them with ease.
Tim,
I’ll have to keep that for my notes, but I have 65 pages. With one redirect for each page, that’s going to be a real lot of redirects in my htaccess file. Also my proposed method forces me to write very long addresses which search engines love - up to a point. I don’t believe people remember addresses of particular pages, search engines do.
Thanks,
Chris
Its not that much of use of put www in the urls. it can be avoided. I don’t use it anycase. it gives me more 4 characters in my urls. It was a convention in earlier times for world wide web representation. Also it should be considered from start which way want to set your url else if you make it later then it may hamper your link equity.
Be careful. www.domain.com is not the same as domain.com and some hosting providers do differentiate between one and the other. It really depends on how the server has been configured although the big majority of hosting providers configure the server in such a way that you don’t notice the difference between using www or not using them at all.
www. is the ‘default subdomain’. Most domains nowadays will rewrite “” as “www” when encountered in the subdomain location, but some will not.
www2 and www3 are most likely load-balancing the original site in non-transparent fashion.
StarLion,
They rewrite “” as “www” because either it’s a serverside default setting or it’s programmed by the programmer in htaccess. If there is no such server side default setting and the programmer didn’t have the rewrite in your htaccess file, then your site will be seen as two sites “” and “www”. So before saying chances are you don’t have to worry about it, one would have to ask their webhost whether they have such a default setting and ask their programmer.
Thanks,
Chris
You’re wrong. While some people don’t remember specific addresses, others do, and there’s no reason not to cater for them, when it has no downsides.
I have been using this snippet to forward people to the non-www url. I did this for several reasons, primarily to ensure a shorter url always displays. This works sitewide.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.thedomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://thedomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
As for hiding file extensions, thanks for sharing that snippet! I do something similar to hide them sitewide, but does not affix the trailing / to the url. For example the url would be: thedomain. com/contact
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\\.htm -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.htm
In my example one note is that both urls will work (say you type in the .htm, the page will pull up as well) so you have to make sure you have a sitemap.xml file properly configured to back this up. I don’t think you would want to do a 301 redirect to forward people to view the page without the suffix sitewide, only because I think it might interfere with other features like javascript that reference html files or cause other forms of chaos. just speculating though 
I am a big fan of using subdomains. I believe it simplifies a URL (as opposed to using a path in the URL) and can help to define the data (ie. blog.yourdomain.com or catalog.ourcompany.com).
The trouble with “WWW” is that it has been so ingrained in users’ brains that when I verbally offer ‘blog.mydomain.com’ for example, they will have trouble because they enter “www.blog.mydomain.com” in the address bar!
Lacking an understanding of what it means, most users ASSUME it is an essential part of the URL.
www stands for world wide web .The name itself indicates the function its doing.Connecting the world via internet.<snip />
Think about duplicate content penalty by search engines too, while using www and no www. Prefer only one address.
I feel, domain name without www is short to type, clean to look.
It really makes no difference other than visual atheistics. Usually all my sites have redirect’s to one or another depending on client’s…
Either that or someone set up a new web server internally and dropped the original, older server onto ‘www2’ that they are looking to migrate away from “ASAP”. Typically done with larger websites where sections are migrated one at a time because doing the whole thing all at once would create a complete disaster. (I’m guilty of doing this myself!)
It is called canonical issue.for more information about it .Please visit this site SEO advice: url canonicalization
I couldn’t disagree with you more. It sounds like you are just stuffing keywords in a file name just for SEO. When I look at the URL I should be able to know what part of the site I am at. If I were at www.domain.com/contact I know I’m at the contact page.
As for www or no www I don’t think it maters much. My host has a public_html folder and a www folder as a symbolic link and that folder is set up as a subdomain.