diff between http:// and http://www.

blade007 · 4 Jul 2006 at 00:06

google has our company as

Code:

http://companyname.com

, yet it should be

Code:

http://www.companyname.com

... are these two different things?

SpicyDuck · 4 Jul 2006 at 00:17

No, most servers support the removal of the "www" part. Type any URL without it into the address and most will still load

.

Mr_L · 4 Jul 2006 at 00:21

WWW is the devil!

I don't think it really matters because which ever way it is typed it still takes you to the same place. There is a movement to remove www from domains and standardise them, mainly because the www is seen as unnecessary typing.

robmiller · 4 Jul 2006 at 00:21

They can be but don't have to be and in most cases are not. I have my server set up to remove www. if anyone types it, because I consider it entirely superfluous. Others agree.

Augmented · 4 Jul 2006 at 00:22

blade007 said:
are these two different things?

Yes. www is a subdomain of the domain name companyname.com.
Just as with anything.companyname.com, anything is the subdomain. A domain name can have many subdomains (and subdomains of that ... n).

As far as Google is concerned, a subdomain is normally considered a separate entity to the main domain. foo.companyname.com is considered related to but not part of companyname.com or bar.companyname.com.

blade007 · 4 Jul 2006 at 00:23

I was wondering if googlebot saw them as 2 independent pages containing identical content and was something to avoid.

edit: augmented just answered this as i was typing

blade007 · 4 Jul 2006 at 00:25

in this case how can i have a redirect so that it only ever sees one of them?

Augmented · 4 Jul 2006 at 00:27

If you want a fairly definitive answer, then have a read of what Matt Cutts has to say on this specific issue - since he works for Google.

301 redirect the URL you don't want to the URL you do

robmiller · 4 Jul 2006 at 00:29

mod_rewrite will do it for you:

Code:

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

blade007 · 4 Jul 2006 at 00:34

thanks. v useful.

gonna give it a go

Beansprout · 4 Jul 2006 at 01:20

robmiller said:
They can be but don't have to be and in most cases are not. I have my server set up to remove www. if anyone types it, because I consider it entirely superfluous. Others agree.

I'm one who disagrees! (Well I agree with the point that http://domain should be accessible identically to http://www.domain but I disagree that http://domain is 'better' purely from a picky idealist point of view)

The internet is not the WWW.....subdomains are about different functions of a domain such as ftp., mail., mysql....each of which may point to a different server. So I reckon www. is better eventhough they're equally as cool - and as for normal people, no-www would be even better because most people don't have a clue about "double u double u double u dot" so the less they have to get wrong, the better

robmiller · 4 Jul 2006 at 01:35

I just don't see why sub-domains should do the job of ports, though. If I access a server on port 80 it's a reasonable expectation that I want HTTP; port 25, SMTP; port 110, POP; etc.

I would expect foo.com:25 to be SMTP, not have to guess whether it was foo.com:25 or smtp.foo.com:25 or mx.foo.com:25 or mail.foo.com:25 or some other hifalutin' jiggery-pokery. Sub-domains are only good for taxonomic purposes, IMO.

Beansprout · 4 Jul 2006 at 01:44

Ah but if you're running a site which has its services spread across servers then you need subdomains. I have www.twobeds.com and files.twobeds.com for instance

robmiller · 4 Jul 2006 at 02:04

Well sure but that's not for different services

Beansprout · 4 Jul 2006 at 02:15

How about mysql.domain.com then

growse · 4 Jul 2006 at 03:31

I once read an article that advocated the use of web.domain.com over www.domain.com, given that it was easier to say. Seemed sensible - think icq.com does that. In any case, I agree with beansprout. Web traffic isn't the only traffic that flows to/from servers within a domain, and sometimes it's important (and useful) to distinguish different ip's with different prefixes.

robmiller · 4 Jul 2006 at 03:49

icq.com is infinitely easier to say than either web.icq.com or www.icq.com thus it is the best.

growse · 4 Jul 2006 at 04:27

robmiller said:
icq.com is infinitely easier to say than either web.icq.com or www.icq.com thus it is the best.

Yes, but only from the point of view of the people who use the www services provided by icq.com. The point is that it's ambiguous. If I say "There's a server at icq.com", you have no idea what sort of service that server offers. If I say "There's a service at www.icq.com (or web.icq.com)" it becomes pretty clear that I'm talking about www (HTTP(S)) traffic.

I own my own domain, and very handily I know that ftp.domain.com is the ftp server, mail.domain.com is the mailserver, dev.domain.com is my dev server and www.domain.com is my webserver. "domain.com" means very little, it's just a label I attach to things I own.

It might not mean very much to the average user, for whom www=internet, but it is important for those of us more enlightened

blade007 · 4 Jul 2006 at 08:29

it seems that our company has two, both the http:// and http://www ...not good after reading what's been said here. I'm gonna standardise it to the www I think, as everyone is used to that.

Lagz · 4 Jul 2006 at 09:19

blade007 said:
it seems that our company has two, both the http:// and http://www ...not good after reading what's been said here. I'm gonna standardise it to the www I think, as everyone is used to that.

Your going to make your company website harder to find?! . . .eer. . . why?