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:
http://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
http://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
Thread Starter
800545
as of now for my site, typing in both http://www.website.com/ and http://website.com/ leads to http://website.com/
how can I change this to make them both lead to http://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 ^(.*) http://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Basically, www is obsolete – so not having it you should be fine.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.
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?
