Using "www"?

It is a good idea for your URL to contain "www".domainname.com? Right now, I just have it domainname.com. Here's the link:
Motown Sports Center

[How to] Setup www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com (www vs. non-www) - With .htaccess 301 redirects

www. is deprecated.

Originally Posted by briansol

www. is deprecated.

Nah, it won't be depreciated sorry.

I prefer to always use 'www' for the main domain and just 'http' for subs and there's a good reason for doing so which almost nobody realizes.

For example:

site:www.wordpress.com - Google Search

Zero results for a site:www(.)wordpress.com because they dropped the www

site:http://wordpress.com - Google Search

Now doing the same for just http, the whole top #50 and beyond is all user subs created on Wordpress with no pages from the actual Wordpress website. Too bad if we wanted to see how many pages, or what pages were indexed from our main website without subs cluttering up the indexed pages count.

Using 'www' provides logical separation between the main site, and subdomains.

You can change www or non-www in your Google webmaster

Try out this query to separate sub-domain results from http://domain.com results:

site:wordpress.com inurl:"http://wordpress.com"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_qdr=all&q=site%3Awordpress.com++in url%3A"http%3A%2F%2Fwordpress.com"

Just because you "prefer" it, doesn't mean it's the "right" way.

Years ago, it was required to have. Today, it's 'assumed', and thus, deprecated.

Look at any big site with a 'modern' design out there now... no one is using www's anymore.

twitter, wordpress, digg, imageshack, and so on.

Joe, yes i'm aware it's still possible to return the results just from the primary domain but when you want to drill down with more advanced queries beyond a simple site: command it gets needlessly difficult.

Originally Posted by briansol

Just because you "prefer" it, doesn't mean it's the "right" way.

Years ago, it was required to have. Today, it's 'assumed', and thus, deprecated.

Look at any big site with a 'modern' design out there now... no one is using www's anymore.

twitter, wordpress, digg, imageshack, and so on.

It may not be the right way, but it's a better way. But as long as the domain accepts traffic on either version and defaults to the webmasters preferred domain it really makes no difference to the end user or to SEO.

I don't know about looking at the big sites, i believe the whole top 20 largest sites on the net use 'www' like Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Microsoft etc.

Even places like Icann, Apache, Arin.net and the W3.org etc use it who deal with this stuff.

I do think there are lots of ways to think about it and lots of valid points that can be made. Your observation about the Google site query is a good one.

Now that Google provides either option in the Webmaster panel, it's less of an issue.

I certainly advocated choosing one and 301 redirecting the other version to the selected one.

Personally, I prefer not using www, since it is not needed functionally. However, we still use www here at vbseo.com.

I'm sure you will be safe either way. Just remember to select your choice in Google Webmaster Tools and also do a 301 on your site.

I agree with Brian , yes today most of bir sites still use www but in couple years www will be deprecated. Also looking at Google is not a good example as if you check Google.com you can see that google.com isn't even validated but as everyone knows , validation has key importance.

Google's not the best example no, but places like the World Wide Web Consortium are who formulate the internet's standards are and yes they validate and force a redirect to www.

Many people just type "domain" and hit Control + Enter which forces the www and com anyway.

I just don't understand why www "redundant" in any way, dropping the www in your URI gains absolutely nothing and causes problems doing Google operators if you also run subs.

I've taught my 60yo mother how to do site + keyword operators to find content on domains, however she would have no idea how to string operators together because the webmaster decided to drop www like the Wordpress example.

Whatever i guess, as long as people force a redirect to one version and have a decent internal search engine.

i did that
[How to] Setup www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com (www vs. non-www) - With .htaccess 301 redirects

all to with the WWW
i set this also with WWW in google webmaster tools.

I am getting a bit diffrent results right now
for site:Gambling Bonus Paradise
and site:Gambling Bonus Paradise

I see many say its nicer and better to not use the www anymore
If i change this now, will googe again reindex all, ja?

Thanks
Marina

I would not change it, if you've had it setup one way for quite some time.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

I would not change it, if you've had it setup one way for quite some time.

thanks Joe,
yes I have the site now about 1 and half year
I did a lot with the forum and right now traffic is raising again
Would be pitty to start all over again

just stick with one of the versions..in your internal linking, when building links
use the same version and redirect the other one using a 301 redirect
simple as that