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Topic: www Question |
Jim Cohen
From:
Philadelphia, PA
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Posted 18 Apr 2006 7:31 pm |
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Can someone 'splain to me, in layman's language, why sometimes I MUST type "www." at the start of a URL in the browser, whereas MOST of the time I can just type the rest of the URL, e.g., domain.com and the browser will fill in the "www." part on it's own? I don't get that.
thx,
jc |
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Wiz Feinberg
From:
Mid-Michigan, USA
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Posted 18 Apr 2006 8:35 pm
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Jim;
Not all Domains have been setup to redirect both requests to the same destination page. If you want to visit such a website and it has been setup to only respond to a request starting with www. and you don't include that prefix, you may get a page not found error message. Some websites are purposely or accidently setup as either ht*p://example.com or ht*p://www.example.com. Others will transparently redirect you to the correct landing page in either case. If you know that a website uses www in it's Domain name, use it when you type it into your addressbar.
Most properly setup accounts will redirect non-www requests to the www content anyway, to avoid duplicate content penalties from the major search engines. A lot of Webmasters have learned the hard lesson about having two different apparent Domain names resolve to the same content, with different prefixes. For instance, if I didn't know better, I might setup a new website called www,example.com (comma used to deactivate link) and create all kinds of cool content and get all kinds of backlinks to help boost my ratings in search results. In my haste I might not check to see if the web hosting company automatically redirects non-www requests to the www Domain name. My rating rise meteorically then suddenly plummet a few months later, for no apparent reason. Upon investigation that I might have to pay experts to perform it is discovered that some people are linking to me, or typing in requests to me as example.com, instead of www,example.com. The search engine Bots follow these links and end up at what appears to be two different Domains, but they have the exact same content. As soon as this is discovered one or both names of my website are removed from the search index, because of this duplicate content.
I know I got ahead of what you were asking for, but I have personally had to battle back from duplicate content penalites caused by me not redirecting non-www requests to my www domains. This includes asking everybody who links to my websites to correct any incorrect links that people or indexing bots might follow. I certainly don't want anybody to type in wiztunes.com and not end up at www.wiztunes.com, in their browser's addressbar, because if you can do it so can Googlebot, and I would get penalized for duplicate content on what looks like two different Domains.
Another thing, Jim. Your browser transmits whatever you type into the addressbar just as it was typed. That request goes to the various so-called Name Servers, where lookups are performed to locate the destination Domain. If the request is not correct for the desired website's configuration, it may not respond with the acknowledgement signal, and you may just get a website not found error page from your browser. It is entirely up to the hosting company or the actual client who owns the Domain to have setup their account to recognize both requests and forward them to the proper landing page, and display that location in your browser's addressbar.
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Bob "Wiz" Feinberg
Moderator of the SGF Computers Forum
Visit my Wiztunes Steel Guitar website at: http://www.wiztunes.com/
or my computer troubleshooting website: Wizcrafts Computer Services,
or my Webmaster Services webpage.
Learn about current computer virus and security threats here.
Read Wiz's Blog for security news and update notices[This message was edited by Wiz Feinberg on 18 April 2006 at 09:40 PM.] |
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b0b
From:
Cloverdale, CA, USA
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Posted 18 Apr 2006 9:57 pm
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It's because some web sites allow www, some don't allow it, and some require it. It's all at the discretion of whoever owns the server.
I set up most of my sites to work with and without the www. I have private servers that don't use www (like bashful.b0b.com, for example, which is usually turned off).
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 Bobby Lee
-b0b- quasar@b0b.com
System Administrator
My Blog |
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Gere Mullican
From:
LaVergne, Tennessee, USA (deceased)
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Posted 19 Apr 2006 6:30 am
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Jim, if you don't want to type the www, you can just type in the domain name and hold the CTRL key and press ENTER and it will automaticall enter the www and the ".com", But it only works with .com and not ..net, .edu or anything else. Something I discovered in my laziness.
Gere |
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