the importance of www ?

[JWJ]

Now I'm really going to show my ignorance :oops:

In my stats, especially on 'Popular Pages', my url's are sometimes shown with 'www' and sometimes not. When typing my address in the browser it doesn't seem to matter whether I prefix it with www, or not. When adding my site to Directories I suspect I have sometimes used it, and sometimes not.

Should I be using 'www' ? Does it have a real purpose ? Should I use it because it's "best practice" ? :?

[motorwatchercounter]

Hi JWJ,

I would alway's use the www prefix when applicable. The long naming convention of http(s)://www.blah.whatever has already been shortened. You should always get the www dropped when loged in somewhere (eg this page is http://forum.statcounter.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2824)
It is easy to forget that there are a lot of people who now associate www with a web address and still get confused with www and @ for sites and emails. Also keeping the www should provide you with an instant link when on a web page.

[webado]

Even though the url with www and the one without www most often default to the same physical address, it is not always the case.

You might run into situations where a www prefixed url doesn't work or actually goes elsewhere. That's because there's no uniform requirement to force this. For the www url to be the same as the non www url, an alias has to be set up on the web site so that the actual root directory and www are one and the same. Most of the time this is the case.

There's a web formalism in email and forums for instance that recognizes anything formed as www.somedomain.com or www.somedomain.net or a few other structures as a url and thus automatically turns it into a hyperlink, by adding a http:// in front of it. Otherwise it will have to be put in manually.

If you notice however an email address does not contain it, you'll not see somebody@www.somedomain.com but you will see somebody@somedomain.com .

When you give out your url, stick to one method generally. If you ever check the PR rankings, you will see a difference between the PR of the www prefixed page and the one without www. For what it's worth, use the one method that results in the highest PR, i.e. the one method used in the links most visitors to your site have followed to link to it. Generally this would be the one with www.

[JWJ]

Thanks for the explanations. I'll make sure I always use www in future ... except when I forget :wink:
If you ever check the PR rankings,
Chris, I have seen many references in this forum to people checking their Page Rankings. How do we do that?

[webado]

Thanks for the explanations. I'll make sure I always use www in future ... except when I forget :wink:
If you ever check the PR rankings,
Chris, I have seen many references in this forum to people checking their Page Rankings. How do we do that?
Hmm, not sure of the formal ways to do that, but I have installed teh Google Toolbar in my Internet Explorer and that's an automatic feature. You can get that from http://toolbar.google.com.

When you install it, you don't have to agree to all the data collection stuff, but only as pertains to activating the PR option.

I think similar things are available with Alexa and others. Google is my choice, especially since I get the added bonus of the search engine as a toolbar, plus a pretty good pop-up killer.

[JWJ]

Cool ... thanks for the info. I'll give it a go ... I always use Google first anyway. :D