Not directly wordpress related but can someone answer this?
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Since a lot of people here seem to know tons about…well..everything computer related..hehe, I was hoping someone could answer this question. What exactly is the difference between a www site and one that is just http://. Also, does it affect how you appear in search engines…etc..? Thanks so much for any input. I’ve been curious about this for a while and I was wondering if it affects traffic or anything else with a site.
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there’s no difference; it doesn’t affect SE results, traffic or anything else on site.
WWW is a hostname acronym used to indicate that particular host on a domain is supposed to serve HTTP requests, while other like ‘ftp’, ‘irc’, ‘news’ or ‘mail’ for instance, would be doing FTP, IRC, NNTP or SMTP/IMAP/POP3 respectively. quite often it still would be the same single box.
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reading past threads i’ve learnt that there is a difference when it comes to a url with or without the www prefix for our wp.com blogs. apparently with the prefix search engines would not recognise it as your blog, or something to that effect.
sorry, i’m saying rather incoherently about what i’ve read around the forums. =P
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uhm, while reading the forum threads one can learn many interesting things ;-)
any mistaken requests to http://www.USERNAME.wp.com are autoMattically get redirected to ‘USERNAME.wp.com’.
so, no worry about :-)
[PS
sorry for reiterating myself, ‘www’ is not a prefix — it’s just a common *host name* i.e. name of any particular box on a domain. it can be anything like ‘sulz’, ‘options’ or ‘сthulhu’, and it’s indeed *prefixed* to a domain name which is a ‘wp.com’ in our case.hostname ‘www’ has no any special magic in itself; instead, it has a *meaning* (this host serves requests on port 80/HTTP) which affects on humans only, not on SE.]
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err, too complex for simple ol’ me to understand. but at least i know it’s not called a prefix! thanks for the little clarification.
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beg your pardon for posting some complex for understanding things, thus giving you a chance to read them; swear I did my best to make ’em as easy as possible.
honestly, I even wanted to remove completely that complex part but unfortunately it was too late — “post is too old to edit” happened too quick.
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hostname ‘www’ has no any special magic in itself; instead, it has a *meaning* (this host serves requests on port 80/HTTP) which affects on humans only, not on SE.
I got it! Thanks options. I understood this part of what you said.
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… there’s no difference; it doesn’t affect SE results, traffic or anything else on site
This is good to know. Thanks :)
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actually the staff (mark i think it was) answered this a while back. if you http://www.yourblog.wordpress.com then search engines wont search your blog, it has to be simply yourblog.wordpress.com
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*sigh* I’m too nice….
The issue is that before wp.com does that redirect from with the ‘www’ bit to the correct url without it, your local DNS server has to be able to “read” the URL you’re looking for. Some DNS servers and a lot of search engine spiders can not or will not be able to read that address if you put the “www” in there as a secondary machine name. Visitors won’t be able to see it due to broken installs of Bind or other DNS servers out there and search engine spiders because it’s a “misformed” URL and therefore not correct.
I think it’s Yahoo that actually sees it as an entirely seperate site and will index your website twice for both URLs, therefore cutting your exposure in half.
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ah, thistimethisspace, you’re not blondie then (dissappointed smile)
if you http://www.yourblog.wordpress.com then search engines wont search your blog,
if you do/have/any other missing Predicate here/ exactly what? try to follow this URL: http://there.is.no.such.website.as.www.tiamatsreviews.wordpress.com
SE bots use the same HTTP to crawl your site as any other HTTP user-agent like web browser. you can try to submit this URL for indexing even, but…it has to be simply yourblog.wordpress.com
and this one is absolutely correct.
I wander about “some implications for search engines and the likes”.
here a couple of short articles on computer-related trivia I’d suggest to read on. the latter was written more than 10 years ago, but is still actual today IMO. think about it in view all that modern web-apps: gmail, wordpress and likes of:
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your local DNS server has to be able to “read” the URL you’re looking for.
err, local agent called a RESOLVER? — no, it doesn’t “read” URL (parsing an URL is a browser’s or similar application’s task), it retrieves information from DNS, like for example translating host name associated with the domain into its address (IP) and vice versa.
and it does resolves:
nslookup there.is.no.such.website.as.www.tiamatsreviews.wordpress.com Server: a.b.c.d Address: 1.2.3.4 Non-authoritative answer: Name: e1143.c.akamaiedge.net Address: 88.221.80.199 Aliases: there.is.no.such.website.as.www.tiamatsreviews.wordpress.com wordpress.com.edgekey.netread something on DNS stuff.
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