Value of http://sitename.com vs http://www.sitename.com?

Question

Over the last couple of years I've seen sites that drop the "wwww" from their URL's. I was wonder what advantages(technical or otherwise) this had over the "conventional" URL address?

Answer 1

None really. But it gives you an advantage of shorter Urls.

I'd like to think minimalist. If "www" has no advantage, why add it?

From the SEO point of view, you should only support one version and make 301 redirect to it from the other one. Consider this very question:

http://www.stackoverflow.com/questions/2849358/value-of-http-sitename-com-vs-http-www-sitename-com

will make 301 redirect to

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2849358/value-of-http-sitename-com-vs-http-www-sitename-com

People will be linking to your pages differently. Some with www, some without. With 301 redirect you tell search engines to give the full page rank to one specific version, which otherwise would be spread across both.