Implications of not forwarding http:// to http://www.

Question

Hi, my company is running IIS and DNN (I'm not a server guy, so color me ignorant), and I've read previous that you should either redirect your .http://www.mydomain to .http://mydomain or Vice Versa. Can anyone give me reasons to do this? (periods "prepended" to remove href)

From what I understand, it's because search engines see those as two different 'sites' (Even when visiting one or the other, I can be logged into one but not the other).

I also heard it can be a duplicate content problem, which search engines dislike.

Just looking for some professional insight, will help me and others.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This allows your site to be more SEO-friendly. Search engine crawlers will view these as two different URLs. That will cause your site's ranking in search engines to have multiple rankings for the same content.

ScottGu describes the problem and how to go about fixing it in a blog post: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/04/20/tip-trick-fix-common-seo-problems-using-the-url-rewrite-extension.aspx

Answer 2

Although it's mostly for SEO, there is also a potential usability issue in that a user who logs in on www.domain.com may get cookies that only work on the www subdomain and will be forced to log in again if they ever follow a link to domain.com (without the www prefix).

Answer 3

In addition to the SEO-friendlyness this also prevents some errors that might come up when both, with and without www works. for example a user could login on www.yourdomain.com and would receive a cookie. later he visit your site via yourdomain.com and the cookie would not apply there.