Fri, May. 21st, 2004, 12:16 pm
Dropping the accursed www

The aesthetics of "www.slacker.com" bother me. The www. is extraneous, difficult to type, even harder to say, and certainly serves no purpose for my environment. [info]dbaker and I have been informally talking about its general needlessness for a while but we've both been intimidated by the prospect of dropping it. The main concern is over potential dilution of search engine presence that might result from trying to relocate to what would effectively be brand-new URLs for all hosted content. Neither of us have much confidence that search engines will properly handle http permanent redirects.

Concerns thrown aside, I decided on a whim today to restructure slacker.com today. Any hits to www or ww or members will now yield permanent redirects to the equivalent url at the base http://slacker.com/. In doing so I also had to discard my old certificate and buy a new cert that also lacks the accursed www. prefix.

Now that this is done, I'm toying with the idea of redirecting all traffic to https:// just on principle. I'd need to be more clever about that, though, and leave WAP or otherwise non-ssl browsers alone. Still debating the best approach for that.
Current Mood: unfocused
Current Music: World Bank by Groove Collective from Dance of the Drunken Master
 Leave a comment | 3 comments

Fri, May. 21st, 2004 09:42 pm (UTC)
[info]decibel45

www is the biggest scam ever perpetrated on the internet public.
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Fri, May. 21st, 2004 10:00 pm (UTC)
[info]ghewgill

Since sometime last year, I've started quoting my own url without the "www.", because I think it looks better. However, I haven't gone to the extent of redirecting requests to eliminate the www, but I wouldn't be opposed to such a thing.

It's unfortunate that the www is so ingrained in users' minds that they automatically want to add it. For example, many times I've said "go to maps.yahoo.com" and the user types http://www.maps.yahoo.com (yahoo helpfully suggests the correct host name).

I've always thought that it would be nice to be able to use DNS SRV records for HTTP, so that the SRV record for the name "_http._tcp.slacker.com." would point to the actual machine offering HTTP services (this is sort of a generalized MX record). I have no idea whether any HTTP clients actually implement this. A quick informal survey of some common domain names shows that SRV records for HTTP are rare or nonexistent (there doesn't even exist _http._tcp.ietf.org.).
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Wed, May. 26th, 2004 11:13 am (UTC)
[info]nevdull: Slashdot does it.

www.slashdot.org redirects to slashdot.org.

Regarding search engines, the most vital change to make is to have people linking to you switch to the http://slacker.com/ notation. Search engines, in general, will treat www.slacker.com and slacker.com as two different hosts... so algorithms that depend on inbound links won't count links to www.slacker.com...

http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=www.slacker.com

That should give you a starting point.

-Nev
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