I've been reading up tonight about having www vs. no-www in my domain name. I read a good bit about it, and it seems I should go ahead and do it (and from testing out a number of sites, i.e. shoemoney.com/perfume.com/etc, I see that most people do this). What I wasn't sure about was the exact right way to do it. I did find a few recommendations of what to add to my .htaccess file, though I would much much rather trust what you guys have to say than a random site I came across hehe - I don't want to accidently offend the mighty google bot. For my domain, I'd like to force it to always have the www.

On a side-note.... I also noticed an additional benefit to sticking to one form of the domain: when you go to a site (i.e. earnersforum.com) where a cookie has stored your login data, you will only be logged in if you go to the type of domain you logged in at (i.e. when I logged in at www.earnersforum.com but later came back to the site by typing just earnersforum.com, I was shown as not logged in... when I switched to the www version, I was logged in).

So anyhow, I would greatly appreciate it if you guys could inform me of what code "you" use use and trust to set this option for your own sites. No doubt it's more simple than I think haha, but oh well.

Thanks you guys!

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoururl\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoururl.com/$1 [R=301,L]


save this file(or ad this line to your existing) as .htaccess with "all files" selected in notepad(replace "yoururl" with your domain name). upload it to your
root. Nice observation skills on that cookie. You now have a very good example for anyone(clients who dont belive the results of a site: query?) you may be trying to convince about canonical url issues.

You can use a 301 redirect by adding this to your .htaccess (replace "domain" with whatever your domain is; also change the extension if it's not a .com)

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

Hi, I prefer my domains without the "www." (I find it meaningless and it adds 4 unnecessary letters to the domain name) and redirect always with something like this (Apache - .htaccess):

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain\.tld [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.tld/$1 [L,R=301]

But regardless of which version you choose, it is important that you consistently redirect to the chosen version.

As for the cookie - it is possible to set a cookie for a site and all its subomains.

Thanks you guys, I got it

lenz... yeah I do kinda like it without as well, though at this point for this particular site, I don't think I ought to switch (i.e. zillions of backlinks with www ... ok not zillions, but close.... sorta)

I'll keep the method in mind though for the future. Heh in my digging into this topic this evening I even ended up learning some about mod_rewrite, regular expressions, and the like... go figure haha

By the way Pearse... I dig your site, good job! Is it based around a custom CMS, or anything open source?

Thanks!

Its proprietary CMS that is constantly be reworked. Fun times though.

Am I the only idiot out there just serving both up via DNS? I tend to drop the www whenever I'm promoting the site, most specifically because the name is rather longish (kamikazelabs.com), and on the offchance that somebody felt they needed to type the URL, it's easier not give them the www.

Another thing though, is that I usually make the href with the www, while the plaintext display is without it. I've never noticed any significant difference between users hitting one or the other, as I've always just served both, via DNS, to the same apache host.