Redirect non-www traffic to www?

[turtle]

I vaguely recall a discussion here at AN about pushing all traffic to the www.domain.com if they typed in domain.com. Is this important and why? My new server doesn't automatically make this shift. If you type in http://turtle2472.com it takes you there just like if you typed http://www.turtle2472.com. The sites are identical as they are effectively reading from the same folder on the server.

So is it really important* that I make my non-www traffic route to the sub-domain www? If I were to do this, how? :o

* Obviously with this site it isn't important since it's more of a share point but there are others.

[noleli2]

No, it isn't important. In fact, I consider the www to be a relic of the early days of the web, and I prefer not to use it. It's always a good idea to have both of them work, though.

I don't remember the exact syntax off hand, but if you google around for 'htaccess rewrite' you should find some info on how to handle redirecting your users.

[Brad]

It's simply a matter of personal preference whether to use www or not.

However, you probably should support only one of the two options, having the other redirect to it. If Google indexes both turtle2472.com and www.turtle2472.com, it may penalize both of them in page ranks for having duplicate content. There's no clear rule on this from Google (is there ever?) but the general consensus is that multiple apparent domains with the same content will do bad things.

[turtle]

Thanks for the input guys. I'll have to figure out how my www redirects to the non-www. There isn't an actual sub-domain folder for www like there are the others. Plesk must do that redirect internally. There is a www sub-domain in the DNS listing though.