
Your Site Only Works with WWW? How and Why to Fix It - EmagineEngine
http://EmagineEngine.com/blog_article/8_0_1_0/
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makecheck
"Fix"...right. This is in fact a really bad idea and should be avoided.

The main argument for shortening domains seems to be based on what people will
type. But every web browser I've seen will try "www.xyz.com" any time you type
just "xyz". So leave the interpretation of lazy typing to the browser bar
where it can be converted into a canonical form on behalf of the user.

There are plenty of reasons _not_ to make the raw domain a web site. Here are
a few:

\- Potentially destroys popularity rankings in search engines because there
are multiple addresses for every page. One popular site instead looks like two
less-popular sites.

\- So-called CNAME in DNS cannot use bare domains. IP addresses must therefore
be hard-coded in a way that is more difficult to change quickly as needed
(e.g. load-balancing, discovery of a DDoS attack, whatever). So users of the
raw domain "xyz.com" will see your site go down for longer than it should
have, even if you've already managed to bring "www.xyz.com" back up by
changing its IP address.

\- Configurations where patterns may be useful don't work, e.g. neither
"{glob}.xyz.com" nor "www.{glob}" will match a bare domain. Maybe you don't
care if you have just one site to worry about, but this gets old if you have a
lot of domains to worry about.

~~~
EmagineEngine
Good info there. Should note that the article is agnostic about which is
better (with or without www). It tells how to make it work with both versions
of the domain, and then suggests redirecting to one of those domains to focus
link juice.

Also note that in our experience, Google Chrome does not redirect
automatically to www. And Chrome is very, very popular now.

~~~
makecheck
Chrome doesn't do that exactly, it requires Control-Enter (which I admit many
people wouldn't try). The autocomplete/search during typing does tend to
product correct domain suggestions too.

------
rachelbythebay
If you have to be told this, odds are, you should not be the one tinkering
with DNS _or_ web server config files.

The most frustrating pattern is when www.example.com works and example.com
goes to their Outlook Web Access. It used to happen so much that I wonder if
it was some misguided default configuration used by some hosting company.

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JoshTriplett
Using mod_rewrite seems like massive overkill here. A simple RedirectMatch
will handle it just fine.

Also, I agree strongly with this, and I redirect www to non-www on every
domain I control. <http://no-www.org/>

