On removing "www."

[Meksilon]

As I'm developing a new site, I'm just wondering about something - should I again remove www. - or is there a compelling reason not to? All I do is put in .htaccess this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.plamdi\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://plamdi.com/$1 [R=301,NC]so that anytime someone accesses the site they're redirected to the sans-www. version (it redirects to the correct page). for instance, liking www.plamdi.com/movies/swcovers.htm (http://www.plamdi.com/movies/swcovers.htm) redirects to plamdi.com/movies/swcovers.htm. The only benefit I know of to having a subdomain prefix is for server distribution (ie www. - sever 1, ww1. - server 2, ww2. - server 3), is there really any other benefit? does www.domainname.com actually LOOK any better then domainname.com?

[sep]

It is good SEO-wise to only have a single alias to your site.
Apart from this and what you have mentioned, I don't see any other reasons for it.
Personally I use the www only for root domains (I don't use it for subdomains).

[Robert]

I refer www.domain.com rather than domain.com. If you visit rr.cx, you'll see it redirects to www.rr.cx

[Darknight]

When I type URL's I never type www first :\
I dont think it looks better having www first

[Richard]

www. is a subdomain - I always remove the www. from domains, it only ad's confusion and messes up SEO - If you add www. you actually lose points in SEO, as you are using a subdomain, not a TLD.

[sep]

Domains and subdomains are both treated as "sites" to search engines. So it's only poor in SEO points if the www has different content to non www.

[Meksilon]

Good feedback guys. One thing that sometimes annoys me, is that forums (like this one, for instance) can be accessible via both www. and sans-www. - and of course if you log in to one, then you'll need to manually log-in to the other. Then to complicate matters, some of us use the www. version, and some use the sans-www. version, and when we post links to other threads some will be the version in which we're not logged in. If you're not confused by now you're a geek.

Anyhow - I just don't see the benefit of it when it just serves no purpose. I typically type-in sans-www. site names; but there are still sites which are not configured to run without www., here's an example: http://action.act.gov.au/ vs http://www.action.act.gov.au - look how many freaking dots are in the domain name!

Anyhow back on topic - does a 301 (moved permanently error code) improve SEO? I mean does a search engine recognize that to mean "don't link to the 301 page" and then associate the link with the correct destination? So if you were to link to Star Wars Covers (http://www.plamdi.com/movies/swcovers.htm), will the search engine go "the link http://www.plamdi.com/movies/swcovers.htm has a 301 code pointing to http://plamdi.com/movies/swcovers.htm, so I'm going to associate the referred page (http://plamdi.com/movies/swcovers.htm) to 'star wars covers' instead of the original link url"?

[sep]

301 redirects, don't particularly improve SEO.
The only instances I can think of are if you have a file, directory or subdomain or even root domain and you change them and you use 301 redirect, to redirect the search engine incoming traffic to the new location.
This helps keep the SEO score of the site high since search engines don't find 404 errors (page not found) on your site.

[Richard]

Okay. Simple question.

Why make your URL longer? :P

[sep]

In my opinion, it's more professional looking.

[kjavia795]

ya how come its that pretty much ALL government sites require www to show the page... they dont even redirect to a www, they just show a page not found.... it is very odd because i used to not typing the www and i have to everytime for a government site.... maybe they r still livin in the stone age :P

[Meksilon]

Well I know the explanation for that, at least a very simple explanation which is that they run their own server instead of getting hosting out of datacentres like the rest of us, and because they run their own servers and even with a few tech guys - they're not any comparison to the "real thing".

[kabatak]

In terms of SEO, it is a misconception that any of the two is better than the other (www vs no www). You only have to choose what you want to promote, if you use www, you must stick to it, if you use no www, you must stick to it. If you always use the two, then you will have a problem.

[serverorigin]

Out of habit I just redirect anything from the root to www.domain.com

[Meksilon]

Okay good, so in principle (according to the last two replies) then it is good to redirect to the one version, whether www. or non-www.?