www.webpage.com/name vs. name.webpage.com

[kanaha]

Hi - I'm not sure where to post this questions.

I've always wondered what the difference is between

http://www.webpage.com/name

versus

http://name.webpage.com

Thanks in advance for any insight you might have.

[Ribeyed]

hi,
i think i can answer this one for you. Web servers have a default document specified which is the home page for your site. Hosts ask you to call your home page a particular name. Mostly its default.*, * beign either Html, asp, etc. When you type in to your broswer www.yourpage.com the web server automatically retrieves the default document and dsiplays that page. You can also call the same page by name like www.yourpage/default.*. Now this doesn't make a lot of difference to your users but in google it does matter. Google will treat this as being 2 pages which is not good. The reason this is not good is to do with Search Engine Optomization and the Google Pagerank.
Hope this helps

[Jona]

Yes, the domain (www.site.com) is simply a DNS server that redirects to the host (whomever that may be). This way you can have multiple domains refer to exactly the same Web site, on exactly the same host. When you go to http://name.domain.com/, however, it redirects to http://domain.com/name/ on the server (although that is not seen by the visitor, usually). When you go to your host, login, and go to the file manager (if it has one, and hopefully it does), you'll go to the public_html folder (this is the top-level folder in which all of your documents should be placed), then the name folder. If you create a new document named index.* (where the asterisk could be asp, html, php, cgi, pl, htm, sht, shtm, shtml, phtml, etc.) or (on some [probably Microsoft] servers), it would be default.*. If that document exists, you can direct people to http://name.domain.com/ or http://domain.com/name/ and you can even exclude the last slash (making it http://domain.com/name).

[J]ona

[Compguy Pete]

So in a nutshell it really comes down to which do you want to use...

There isn't a right or a wrong way to setup your site.

However make sure you think ahead, I have my oldest site I now wish I had planned a bit better! To move all the pages into a better directory setup would be a pain on my SE rankings.

[kanaha]

Wow!

Thanks for the great answers. This was always a mystery to me.