Why using “www” might not be such a bad idea
If you’re a tech-nerd like me you already knew this, www is deprecated. To cite no-www.org:
By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the ‘http://’ onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.
It does sound stupid doesn’t it? Buy a domain to only use a subdomain. But is it really? The painfull truth is that most people are stupid (or ignorant for that matter)…
I’ve been testing a little with a couple of my “no-www” domains and apparantly approximately 20% of all natural homepage links point to www.domain.com. even though it’s redirected to the non-www equivalent. That leaves us with one question: are redirected links less valuable then direct links?
I believe they are, Google (and most large search engines for that matter) keep so called “link profiles” containing data like age of a link, target page and much more. It does look like the value of these link-profiles isn’t transferred, even if there’s a 301 permanent redirect. I know for a fact that Yahoo doesn’t (I have a domain ranking top 10 for a very competitive keyword, even though it’s been redirected for over 9 months).
So the next time you launch a new website you may want to consider using it anyway, even though it looks less cool…
Update with example
Take CssMania for example (the first one I found after publishing this post). Sure, they have over 50k links pointing to http://cssmania.com but another 10k+ pointing to http://www.cssmania.com. That’s one in five.
July 23, 2007 - RSS for Comments
One in six, really. 60k links in total, 10k pointing to www ;)
Uhh, right…
Never blog whilst doing your taxes. Yet another thing you can learn from this :-)
As described on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Www#WWW_prefix_in_Web_addresses
the www stands for the name of the service the host provides, like many hosts use the ftp subdomain for ftp transfer. Technically it isn’t necessary but I think it looks more professional. I use www for the website the whole world wide web may see and for private stuff I use the password protected subdomain ‘private’. So I don’t only use the subdomain I use the whole domain, only the world may only see a little part of it, the www part.
I’ve been seeking information on how to properly link internally back to my homepage. http://www.homepage.com or simply index.html? …or does it matter either way?