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Okay, so what are the Pros and Cons of my decision moving forward? I'm going to say that I'm not concerned about "dated conventions". I'm looking for branding, short and sweet URI addresses and no confusion whatsoever.
It's even a pain repeating dub-dub-dub. I'm through with it and good riddance!
www > 301 > root
http://example.com/
It doesn't get any simpler than that. :)
[ISAPI_Rewrite]RewriteCond %HTTPS off
RewriteCond Host: (?!^example\.com$)(.+)
RewriteRule /(.*) http\://example.com/$2 [I,RP]RewriteCond %HTTPS on
RewriteCond Host: (?!^example\.com$)(.+)
RewriteRule /(.*) https\://example.com/$2 [I,RP]
As stupid as we fellow webmasters :.
At least WWW needs to be there, just example.com will look so inappropriate for many people.
I like the brevity of not having a www, but some people will assume it is needed and type it in. On the other hand if you do not have it, some people will assume it can be omitted. Either way you need the redirect.
I doubt it has much effect on search, assuming you are talking about a new site rather than switching. Not many users are going to do complex searches like inurl:www and the like (I am not sure why anyone would do that either!).
It comes down to shorter URLs vs being like everyone else.
The fact that many big sites use other subdomains means people do see sites without the www quite a lot. en. on Wikipedia, finance. on yahoo .news on the BBC etc. Most of those do have the www. on the main page, but it is not an invariable pre-fix anymore.
As email is a much older technology (1965 first emails, 1982 RFC SMTP standard) than websites, I think the SMTP protocol has more rights to the short domain name than HTTP.
However, almost every SMTP/POP3 client on the planet will be connecting to smtp.example.com and pop3.example.com to send and receive their mail.
Those names have no effect on the email addresses that they actually work with.
However, almost every SMTP/POP3 client on the planet will be connecting to smtp.example.com and pop3.example.com to send and receive their mail.
No, they won't. All SMTP clients first query for A and MX records for "example.com" without smtp or pop3. If no MX record exist, the A record is used which is the IP address directly associated with example.com. Otherwise the value of the MX records is used which is--especially for smaller domains where people don't have their own email server setup--in many cases an email server on a domain other than example.com.
I just used the example to show that there is no definite answer what the proper use of example.com without www or mail would be.
FWIW, I today scanned through five weeks of Apache logs to find image hotlinking abuse. My experience from that scan is that about 95% of the sites which hotlink to my images use either www.example.com, forum(s).example.com or useralias.socialnetworkingsite.com. The few sites with example.com were without exception from tech-savvy people operating a small site. It was certainly not the mainstream in my investigation.
The canonical issue is still widely considered by the webmasters all around.
It sounds like we disagree on the WWW part, but after doing this kind of software for about 8 years now, I am 100% confident default to no-www is the best interest of usability even if it is not perfect SEO.
The above is the "Quote of the Day".
Can you believe this is the type of response I'm coming up against even after providing reference to this topic? No, not from the original client that I convinced prior, but from someone else who is adamant on forcing non-www on its users.
Yes, I resurrected an older topic but it is definitely an ongoing issue that should be discussed.
It's been few months, any findings to report?
Is dropping the www something you recommend doing from the get-go OR would it be OK to modify existing sites after-the-fact?
And if so (for part 2), what would be the anticipated benefit of doing so?
