www vs no www

  • hey guys,

    can someone explain the significance of https://www.website.com vs website.com? should a site have both addresses linking to the same site? or is it better to have just one?
    If so, how do we make sure there’s only one?

    someone please clarify this,
    Thank You,
    TCT

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)

  • website.com is a top-level domain (TLD)

    www is a subdomain

    it makes no difference if you have accessibility via both, as long as you are consistent in your internal linking, and thats only because of spidering.

    This person agrees with me:

    https://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200601/search_engines_and_canonical_urls/

    “www” is just an alias. How it’s setup depends on what’s setup for the domain…not just the site itself….so as an example:
    mail.website.com
    https://ftp.website.com
    and so on…
    Depending on whether or not you have access to the DNS server which has that domain in its records, you can configure how the domain resolves in dozens of different ways.

    If you don’t have access to DNS do a dig on the domain name to see how it’s setup. There are many free tools on the interwebthingy which can be of assistance to you. Doing a fast Google gave me this one though I’m sure there are many others.

    It might be helpful to know what you’re shooting for here. Post back with more info to enable us to help you in a more specific way.

    Hope this helps!

    Thread Starter 800545

    hey guys

    the reason I posted was because I was reading up on SEO and came across a post on a blog that said not differentiating b/w the 2 can lead to duplicate content – I wasn’t sure how this was possible and so I posted here.

    So as long as I maintain one consistent method for internal linking and posting my links elsewhere, it should all be good?

    Thanks again!
    TCT

    So as long as I maintain one consistent method for internal linking and posting my links elsewhere, it should all be good?

    yes.

    Thread Starter 800545

    as of now for my site, typing in both https://www.website.com/ and https://website.com/ leads to https://website.com/

    how can I change this to make them both lead to https://www.website.com/?

    did you read the link i posted?

    Thread Starter 800545

    sorry, it didn’t load, kept giving me an error msg

    Thread Starter 800545

    ahhh got it, I should add this to my .htaccess –

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

    is that code correct? I didn’t mistype a back/fwd slash anywhere did I?

    Basically, www is obsolete – so not having it you should be fine.

    Thread Starter 800545

    ohh I didn’t know that

    ok, so I should keep things the way they are then and leave out the www

    thanks moshu!

    it doesnt matter, youre making much ado about nothing.

    delete

    (@moonbatwingnut)

    I asked this same question, because of the same concern – There are a BUNCH of posts out there in GoogleSearchLand that advise making that change to the .htaccess file for the duplicate content thingy. And they all advise ADDING the WWW

    My site always resolves to non-WWW so I’ll leave it alone.

    BTW, my screen name here used to link to my website, but now it doesn’t. It’s in my profile, is there more to it?

    I think it is set that only after a certain number of posts will become a link. Maybe with the last update/work on the site something changed?

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
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