Make a stand – WWW or no-WWW

Posted on 03. May, 2006 by Daniel Aleksandersen in Web Development

A good SEO tip that humans as well as search engines really approve of is short URLs.

So would that require cuting down on everything not needed? Such as the www. prefix?

Whatever you want to keep or remove the WWW. prefix you should make a stand. Many Websites accept both. This is of course wise. But you have to consider some things:

  • The URLs become longer for both search engines with the WWW. prefix.
  • A few users might not understand that the address is a Website without the WWW. prefix.
  • Allowing traffic on both makes search engines look at them as two separate domains. With and without the WWW. prefix. Which means you could had a higher ranking in search engines if just everyone linked to the same domain.

Go to no-www.org and www.yes-www.org for more views on the matter from both sides.

No matter which one you decide, you should go for one of them. And redirect traffic from the other one to the one you chose to go for.

Here’s a simple Apache rewrite rule that will redirect traffic away from the WWW. prefix and over to just the shortned version:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

4 Responses to “Make a stand – WWW or no-WWW”

  1. Magnus

    05. May, 2006

    Nice to see you a little open minded on some subjects :)

    Reason why I mostly use www. when addressing URLs, is because IM-programs doesn’t understand that e.g. thewebdesignjournal.com is an address, whereas it fully understand http://thewebdesignjournal.com or http://www.thewebdesignjournal.com

    Typing out http:// is more time consuming and more of a thorn to the eye than the more simple and elegant www.

    In all honesty, I feel that Web browsers should hide the http:// in front of the Web address on the address bar.
    If it’s an https://, simply use some graphics to indicate a secure Website (eg. Safari uses a lock and turns the address bar yellow).

    And anything ending with a domain name should automatically turn into an address in IM-programs.

  2. WZot

    06. May, 2006

    I try always to use the version without the www. as the site; with the www. subdomain forwarding to the one without.

    I’ve never really thought about what you’re saying there with the removing of http://, but I think that people are so used to it now that it can just aswell be in the address bar. Faster to find out if I’m on a http://, https:// feed:// or whatever I might be on. :)

  3. Magnus

    06. May, 2006

    Yes, of course, it is a fast way to realize whether you’re on a secure server, reading a feed or whatnot, but I personally find it as useful as if I would type “content:” before the content on my site begins, or “Navigation” above the menu.

    :)

  4. Daniel

    06. May, 2006

    You do type «content» and «navigation» wherever you have content and navigationmenus. xHTML markup, you know!

    Hehe, anyway… I think it should be there. If it’s to be removed it would be difficult to define the URI for alternate content. Such as eD2K links and so on.

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