My domain is both www and non www, why? Confused

[kash86uk]

Hi, I have got myself a domain recently, and I have uploaded my site.

When I type www.example.com or example.com (without www), it shows my website, -what I have uploaded.

Whatever way you type (with or without www), it shows the address you have typed on the address bar with my website, -the contents I have uploaded.

How do I know where I have actually uploaded my website to? Is it on the subdomain (www) or the main site (without www: http://example.com)?

Or does this mean the url 301/302 redirection is on, or url masking or something?

[aj_nsc]

You don't upload your site to a domain, you upload it to a server (i.e. a computer connected to the internet) and then your registrar points your registered domain where you tell it (nameservers which routes the user to the server [i.e. computer] that your website is on). A domain with or without www will be pointed at the same nameservers and, if your host is configured to do so, they'll point a request to either the www or the non-www domain to the same file on their server.

What's the problem? You seem upset, is this a bad thing?

[kash86uk]

thanks for your reply.

Recently I have read about not having a 301 redirection to either www subdomain or the main domain (http://example.com), can impact on search engine listing.

So I am a little stuck on what to do, should I leave it as it is, or 301 redirect it, or use googles webmaster tool to select a preffered domain (and with yahoos too), if so do I select www or non www? So many things to think about.

[aj_nsc]

Leave it. Google is smart enough to know that www and non-www points to the same content. Unconcern yourself with this. No redirects are going on here, don't bother putting any in place (unless you need to for other technical reasons, which do come up from time to time).

[jaysantos]

Leave it. Google is smart enough to know that www and non-www points to the same content. Unconcern yourself with this. No redirects are going on here, don't bother putting any in place (unless you need to for other technical reasons, which do come up from time to time).

The only issue I have with this comment is that Google views www.website.com and website.com as a seperate page. If you would ever like to get a good page rank, it needs to be only one.

You simply need to do what you read about. redirect one to the other. This way if you want it to be with the "www." it will show the "www." even if someone doesn't put it in.


For example. type "google.com" into your search bar. what happens?

Furthermore if you do not redirect it, you will have to register both forms of the domain name in Google's Webmaster Tools.

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Now about your initial question, I agree with aj_nsc first post. The domain name is the address and the server files are the website at that address.

I could explain how a Domain Name Works, but I think this Excerpt from Wikipedia does the job.

Here is how a Domain Name Works:

Domain name syntax

A domain name consists of one or more parts, technically called labels, that are conventionally concatenated, and delimited by dots, such as example.com.

• The right-most label conveys the top-level domain; for example, the domain name www.example.com belongs to the top-level domain com.

• The hierarchy of domains descends from the right to the left label in the name; each label to the left specifies a subdivision, or subdomain of the domain to the right. For example: the label "example" specifies a subdomain of the "com" domain, and "www" is a subdomain of "example.com". This tree of labels may consist of 127 levels. Each label may contain up to 63 ASCII characters. The full domain name may not exceed a total length of 253 characters.[2] In practice, some domain registries may have shorter limits.

• A hostname is a domain name that has at least one associated IP address. For example, the domain names www.example.com and example.com are also hostnames, whereas the com domain is not. However, other top-level domains, particularly country code top-level domains, may indeed have an IP address, and if so, they are also hostnames.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name

[aj_nsc]

From http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=44231

Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead. In addition, we'll take your preference into account when displaying the URLs. If you don't specify a preferred domain, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages.

Ok, so register one or the other (www.example.com or example.com) with google's webmaster tools. But you still do not need to do any redirects because, as I indicated, google is smart enough to know that www.example.com and example.com point to the same site, although you do have to register one or the other with google's webmaster tools first.