A really silly question....

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portege

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#36652 29-Jun-2009 21:43

But when you type a web address in your browser - what's the difference when you type in without the "www" in the past it has taken me to different pages...

freitasm

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#229368 29-Jun-2009 21:49

The "www" is just a subdomain - in general it should direct both traffic to [www.companyname.com] and [companyname.com] to the same place - but sometimes webservers aremisconfigured, or the subdomains are being used for different things.

Good Search Engine techniques say to choose one and stick to it - even using 301 redirects to ensure a single domain (most search engines see www and non-www as different domains and therefore duplicated content, which is not well liked by them)...

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paradoxsm

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#229387 29-Jun-2009 22:42

some connections (many work places) i have used actually hijack the sub domain and redirect it to one of those stupid squatting sites "what you want, when you want it" scams. Even works for some incredibly common sites.

adam77

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#229964 1-Jul-2009 15:16

domain names get resolved to IP addresses

cf:
ping google.com
ping www.google.com

eXDee

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#229969 1-Jul-2009 15:33

www looks like and clean for the URL, just personal preference here.

tonyhughes

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#229982 1-Jul-2009 16:06

portege: But when you type a web address in your browser - what's the difference when you type in without the "www" in the past it has taken me to different pages...

xyzsite.co.nz

www.xyzsite.co.nz

forums.xyzsite.co.nz

www2.xyzsite.co.nz

bobsmith.xyzsite.co.nz

Five different unique web addresses.

Convention is generally around 'www' being a human readable web page, but there is no technical limitations, restrictions, or merit around naming schemes (other than length, characters, etc)

All the domains I host either have 'www' stripped, or added, depending on the requirement for the site.

My host has a nifty feature to select "add www if missing, strip www if present, or allow both". I never allow both.

tonyhughes

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#229993 1-Jul-2009 16:24

eXDee: www looks like and clean for the URL, just personal preference here.

It also adds four unnecessary characters to a URL :o)

Some urls really suit it I think:

www.trademe.co.nz

while others, I think look better without:

is.gd

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adam77

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#230007 1-Jul-2009 16:51

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web#WWW_prefix_in_Web_addresses

Many Web addresses begin with www, because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. So, the host name for a web server is often www as it is ftp for an FTP server, and news or nntp for a USENET news server etc. These host names then appear as DNS subdomain names, as in "www.example.com".

The use of such subdomain names is not required by any technical or policy standard; indeed, the first ever web server was called "nxoc01.cern.ch",[16] and many web sites exist without a www subdomain prefix, or with some other prefix such as "www2", "secure" etc. These subdomain prefixes have no consequence; they are simply chosen names. Many web servers are set up such that both the domain by itself (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to the same site, others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites.

When a single word is typed into the address bar and the return key is pressed, some web browsers automatically try adding "www." to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end. For example, typing 'microsoft' may resolve to http://www.microsoft.com and 'openoffice' to http://www.openoffice.org. This feature was beginning to be included in early versions of Mozilla Firefox (when it still had the working title 'Firebird') in early 2003.[17] It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only with regard to mobile devices.[18]