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I am having a confusion which domain to go with.

domain or www.domain

I dont care about the redirections between each other. I would like to know which one is better in any ways.

Update: Greg's links below have very useful info. Must visit.

Joel Coehoorn
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San
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    Be sure to read [What’s the point in having “www” in a URL?](http://serverfault.com/questions/145777/whats-the-point-in-having-www-in-a-url) over on Server Fault. – Greg Hewgill Jun 29 '10 at 07:09
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    possible duplicate of [WWW or not WWW, what to choose as primary site name?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1109356/www-or-not-www-what-to-choose-as-primary-site-name) – Greg Hewgill Jun 29 '10 at 07:10
  • @Greg Hewgill, great answer but totally irrelevant for SEO. – eugeneK Jun 29 '10 at 07:13
  • What's the question got to do with SEO? – Greg Hewgill Jun 29 '10 at 07:14
  • @Greg I read the links and those were very useful. Sorry about the duplication. However, SEO is one of the considerations. As Sohnee said, naive users may just skip your site because you don't have www. prefix. Even though geeks develop a site, they definitely need naive users to visit. Hope I am right. – San Jun 29 '10 at 07:19
  • @Greg Hewgill, i guess it does if user tag them with SEO tags only – eugeneK Jun 29 '10 at 10:27

3 Answers3

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It doesn't matter for SEO. The most important thing that you will always redirect to one and only instance so crawler bots won't count by mistake www.a.com/index.html and a.com/index.html as double content even though modern bots can detect it is the same site and the same page of it. Without www. it is easier for user to write in address bar and easier to remember. I would go for a.com instead of www.a.com. Once you add both to your server, make proper redirection using IIS proper settings or .htaccess file on Apache. Afterwards add website to Google Webmaster tools and other common web analysis systems while it is important to set default domain in there. Set it without www. !

Good luck

eugeneK
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    Even I prefer non-www over www. Thanks! – San Jun 29 '10 at 07:07
  • www. is useless piece of information. It is main subdirectory for 99% of sites so could be avoided as any even old browser can access non-www links. – eugeneK Jun 29 '10 at 07:11
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    I prefer non-www, too. But Sohnee has a point, non-technical users often expect www. Maybe you want to type down the URLs and have a look at it, sometimes i find one URL just "looks right" ... – Hinek Jun 29 '10 at 07:18
  • @Hinek, we talk about urls inside of site not written urls. If you use text urls for examples visit us at www.a.com then you can use text but links to images, pages and other is totally irrelevant for end user because he doesn't see these. – eugeneK Jun 29 '10 at 07:23
  • @eugeneK, as far as I understand, you will keep all your URLs in the same style www or non-www. So yes, nobody sees the image URLs, but they see the URL of the website in the adressbar and this should be equally www or non-www. – Hinek Jun 29 '10 at 07:45
  • @Hinek, i deal with basic PC users who use our products. None of them ever knew address bar exists at all. User above knowing about address bar does know that it doesn't matter whether you write www.a.com or a.com, unless some smart ass mis-configured his server for only one instance of those. – eugeneK Jun 29 '10 at 10:31
  • Actually it does... you should look at if more peopel are using/linking to your www or plain domain. Google looks at www.example.com and example.com as diffrent domains you can spesify in Google Webmaster Tools which version you want to display but you could be loosing some seo value by splitting your links across 2 "diffrent" domains... use the rel=canonical tag to help google catch some of those duplicate content issues – Carter Cole Jun 30 '10 at 17:36
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To some extent the answer to this question depends on your audience. More technical websites like to drop the www, such as jQuery.com and (of course) stackoverflow.com

If your website is intended for an average home user, they tend to expect the www at the start of the web address and you may cause confusion and possibly even dis-trust if you fail to include it.

The most important thing is that your website works both with and without (preferably redirecting to your preferred option as people may share a link to the page you are on and search engines need to know the true "source" of the page), but think about your audience when you decide which to use.

Fenton
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    I'm intrigued -- on what do you base the idea that a www-less site might engender distrust? – harpo Jun 29 '10 at 07:03
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    @harpo, the answer is above average home user never trust geek audience like us. It's a modern anti-geek racism. www. what makes us different. – eugeneK Jun 29 '10 at 07:09
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    I get your point. Naive user may get confused with a non-www. I still hear somebody says to other a link .. "write it down 'h' 't' 't' 'p' .. 'slash','slash'.." ;-) My doubt is, how to maintain the consistency of the non-www domain wherever I give the link? Do I have to use everywhere the non-www domain name only? In all my pages and wherever I publish it? – San Jun 29 '10 at 07:12
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IMO, non WWW is better for blogs/personal sites etc.....and WWW is good for company sites, orgs etc...

Jumani
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    Can you elaborate more on this? I don't get your point. – San Jun 29 '10 at 08:28
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    I think that its all a matter of perception and usability for your target visitors....like most web savvy people tend not to use WWW nowadays.....but companies/products and all non web2.0 type sites....use it without WWW....any way is better...its just what you think your visitors would like.... :) – Jumani Jun 29 '10 at 08:54