Is the www. best used for the domain name.

hi,
i am not quite sure, but i dont think, that the www. is a must. people just got used to it as an indication that the following is an internet site.
i noticed that on postings of flyers it is either written: https://www.tawfik.at or https://tawfik.at.
since there is no www. in the domain, you have to indicate, that this words are used as an internet url.
another thought is that the www. indicates, that this is the website of this domain. and i would assume, that i can reach the mailserver by mail.domain.com or the ftp server by https://ftp.domain.com.

with my site i did it this way: my dns points just to tawfik.at
but i also entered a CNAME entry in the dns which is called https://www.tawfik.at
so it doesnt matter what url you use to get my site.

conclusion: i dont think, or better dont know, that there is a technical reason for using either this or that way. its just something about convenience.

bye, chris

Search engines treat two url’s with different sub-domains as two different site (and quite rightly). Therefore, it’s not the lack of a www that is a penalty but the fact that links to the www address not transferring PR to the non-www address (and vice versa).

Hence, it’s a good idea to choose one form and stick by it. Whether a www. subdomain is used or not is not important (though there are some that advocate going the non-www route for idealistic reasons). Just choose whatever form you feel is better for you in your circumstance. You don’t want to split PR between two identical sites.

Also, remember PR in and of itself is *NOT* useful. It is only useful because it’s a factor in search rankings, nothing more.

BTW, not using WWW has not definitely hurt the PR of www.ads-software.com; instead, by not splitting PR, WP features extremely well.

ifelse
maybe, some seo say it is a handicap, some say no.
I’m using a rewrite rule in my htaccess,
without www change in the addressline of the browser to
an adress with www,

or
adress with www change to one without..
kindly regards
Monika

This is interesting, I had no idea there was such a controversey going on over www or no-www. Even a website called https://www.no-www.org oops! excuse me I meant https://no-www.org. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings no-www.org. Who would have ever thought of a no-www website. Anyway, thanks for chiming in all information is greatly appreciated. Anyway here is my concern in more detail. It appears as stated above that if you sometimes id your site as www and sometimes no-www, then you are splitting your pr. Each dupe site may have lower pr than it would have had you stuck to only one method. Am I right with this? So my concern deepens, as when you register your pages with google, they reqest you use (as per their example) the www. If I register all my pages with google with www and all my blog pages use no-www then obviously some will be registered as www and some with no-www. Therefore I have split the pr between to indentical sites. If I now use recommended htaccess file discussed above, to force google to look at the no-www or full www only, will my split pr then be centered on which ever htaccess decision I make. That is htaccess to all www or no-www. Thanks for all this enlightening information.

I had no idea that the www made a diff in the PR.

I realized that https://www.ajaydsouza.com/ has a PR of 6 while that of https://ajaydsouza.com has only 3. Maybe because I always use the www!

This is significant, be aware that when you ask for a link from a hi-roller like a real estate website with a pr of 6 or more, they mostly use auto pr verifiers to check to see if you are worthy of linking to them. Those auto pr checkers always use www. and if you have been pushing the no-www. for a long time you may have a pr5 for the no-www, but only a pr2 for the www. When the hi-roller checks your site using the www. and you come in at a 2, the stick their nose up at you and say no way will I link to you (you nobody) end of story. You can loose (be rejected) more times than you can imagine on a link request to a high pr site and you may never know why. So for me, I think I will try to make sure that anytime I put my domain name anywhere, it will be with the www. and maybe I will also use htaccess to force any of my existing querys that come in as no-www to be redirected to www. Sorry no-www.com but I am not ready to go naked yet, at least not until google stops splitting the pr betweeen to identical sites called www. and no www.

Keep the ideas coming, lets make this a hefty discussion as to why or why not use www.

Can I suggest that this is taken to a blog ?
You can leave a url here so people can followup on the discussion there.

This thread moved to the Misc. forum.