@ArizonaHot - Good gracious! (url=http://www.ithkuil.net/index.htm) Ithkuil
-40hz
proper URL is without the triple w: http://ithkuil.net
-Curt
Hi Curt! That's news to me.
I always thought that was an SEO consideration for the site owner rather than a visitor issue.
It's true that, from a search engine perspective, there
is a difference between
xyz.com and
www.xyz.com. But this isn't something that affects anything on the user level unless
xyz.com is a
subdomain - in which case the leading www would need to be omitted when browsing to it. However, last I heard, "best practice" was to use the
www.xyz.com form as your canonical URL -
unless you already had a Google ranking. And if you did, you needed to find out which format got more hits, and then redirect the other to the more popular one.
Since I only very rarely run into situations where the leading www
has to be removed in order to get to a website, my rule of thumb is to include it. In the past, most site developers I've talked to said they use the "www + redirect" trick for SEO purposes. So from a visitor's perspective "to www or not to www" shouldn't matter either way.
But it's been a while since I was last involved in web stuff. Has the above convention since changed?
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Note: I always test the links in anything I post so at least I know they work even if they're not 'proper' URLS. Besides, most forum and e-mail software will assume a text string that starts with 'www.' is a URL and aromatically treat it as a link. So I think it's generally more convenient to keep the www in a posting unless it causes problems.