Is your web site accessible if you don’t type www-dot at the beginning of the URL? If your web site doesn’t display when you leave the www-dot part out, then perhaps you need to wonder if this is harming your web presence, and your ability to be found – both by direct visitors, and via search engines.

When the Web first became mainstream, the www part of an address was synonymous with the Internet. As businesses started to increasingly advertise their web sites in mainstream media, billboards, radio ads, TV spots, and magazines were filled with the domain names of their shiny new websites, and almost every single one included the www (World Wide Web). This was probably a neccessity – with large hoards of people being introduced to the concept of web domain names and email addresses, the www was like a sign-post pointing on-line. So has anything changed – is the www-dot still as neccessary as ever?

We’re seeing more and more web sites advertising their services without including the www part – perhaps they feel people no longer need a sign-post, or perhaps dropping the www shows the company as being part of the web 2.0 generation, where www-dot sounds so 1.0. Flickr.com, Digg.com, Google.com – when was the last time you saw a web site being promoted when the www was invited to the party? Perhaps a better gauge is how you communicate domains and interesting sites by mouth – do you tell people your site is www.your-site.com, or just your-site.com?

There a lot of disucssion around the web at the moment about whether you should develop a site with or without the www, with campaigns geared for and against the www.

Whichever way you communicate your business web address, make sure that visitors can reach your site with or without the www. I’ve been working with some clients already this year whose sites were only accessible if you typed the www-dot part. I think this is a mistake. By all means, advertise your site with or without the www, just make sure that you’re not forcing your visitors to get it right – you’ll be the only one to suffer if you do.

Don’t force visitors to have to get it right – think for them (my favourite web development mantra – Don’t make me think!) and make sure that whether they include it or not, they end up at your site. Don’t assume your visitors will type in the www part of your domain, if you do make this assumption, cover your ass (and maximise your traffic) by ensuring that those visitors who forget to type it, still end up where they should be.

What about the www and SEO?

As far as I know, there is no direct consequence to your SEO efforts for not including the www in your domain name. The most important point to note is that Google treats them differently – as if they were two different sites. If you’ve got half your incoming links pointing to www.your-site.com, and half to your-site.com, then your search optimised pages are only working half as hard for you. The page rank (and search engine love), will be split between the two domains.

The easiest way to overcome this, is to set up a redirect. This way, if your visitor types the www: fine, if they don’t type the www: fine. A redirect also tells the Search engines that all your hard-earned incoming links are for the same site.

WARNING: CODE ON ROAD AHEAD!

If your site is running on an Apache server, a redirect is fairly straightforward. You should have a file in the root html directory called .htaccess. Make sure you double-check it definately doesn’t exist before creating one – it could be hidden and could contain a lot of important rules for how your site address behaves.

Your .htaccess file should contain:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^your-site.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.your-site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(replace the your-site.com with your actual domain name.)
.

What ever you choose to do with your www:

• Try and be consistent in your naming;
• Ensure visitors can reach you with or without it;
• Beware if you don’t you’re confusing users, diluting search rankings for your domain, and probably missing out on some opportunities to drive traffic.

Go check your web address and make sure it is accessible with or without the www.