To www or not to www? • Hacker News Board

Re: To www or not to www?

#21

Post by iamjustin » Sun, Feb 02, 2014, 8:22 PM UTC

purephase wrote: post #12

I'm surprised at the www supporters. Do not do this. Down the road, you will want to use subdomains (app.example.com, dashboard.example.com) and choosing www out of the gate will make it more complicated then it's worth. If HTTPS is required, then a certificate with www will always get in the way, get a non-www and add a subject alternative name, or get a wildcard. It is much, much easier to redirect all non-www traf…

What do you lose by setting those up as example.com/app and example.com/dashboard instead?

Re: To www or not to www?

#22

Post by lingben » Thu, Feb 06, 2014, 7:52 AM UTC

tedivm wrote: post #7

With "www". That makes it a lot easier to add in CDN support, DNS based load balancers, and a ton of other tools down the line. Why? Because you need your domain root to have all sorts of other stuff in it- MX records, SPF keys, and various other things. A lot of CDNs and DNS based tools work really well by utilizing CNAMEs, which you can't do on the root. Putting your website on "www" keeps is as a separate isolated…

what if you don't use CNAMEs? A records are much better imho

Re: To www or not to www?

#23

Post by blowski » Thu, Feb 06, 2014, 11:48 AM UTC

vdwijngaert wrote: post #19

dhoulb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean having both serve the same content? Yeah, the downside is SEO. Google picks up both versions and labels it duplicate content. You can put a canonical meta tag on each page, but as I understand you lose a few percent of the page's value. 301 redirect is the only way to conserve all of the value. Not an expert, just repeating stuff I've been told by our SEO guys.

According to Matt Cutts, who works with the Google Search quality team, you actually lose some of the link value passed through a 301 redirect.

There's no penalty for redirecting an entire root-level domain to a subdomain, as long as your sitemap and internal linking strategy all point to the subdomain.

From Google's perspective, the problem with 301s is that they take longer to load (since you've got to request two separate URLs) and they make your URL structure less stable. Neither of those is a problem if you make it clear to Google that your content belongs on a subdomain.