9 sites who don't know that www.domain.com ISN'T THE SAME as domain.com 6
You may not know it, but the www version of your website is not the same as the non-www version.
What this means is that yourdomain.com/page is NOT THE SAME PAGE as www.yourdomain.com/page. The URL without the www at the front is treated as a different URL by search engines, for instance. And if someone leaves off the www (on a link or when they type a URL), they may not get any page at all unless you've set your server up right (explained at the end).
Does your website work on the non-www version, or do you get a message like this?
9 sites that don't seem to know this
This ought to be fairly well known in this day and age. But click the following sites and you'll go to the non-www version of their homepage - and in each case, you won't get anything.
- Body shop: http://thebodyshop.co.uk
- W H Smith: http://whsmith.co.uk/
- Woolworths: http://woolworths.co.uk/
- Jessops: http://jessops.com
- Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs: http://hmrc.gov.uk/
- UK Trade & Investment: http://uktradeinvest.gov.uk/
- Companies House: http://companieshouse.gov.uk/
- Oxford University: http://ox.ac.uk/
- Open University: http://open.ac.uk/
Solutions to the problem
You can serve up your whole website on both the www and non-ww version of your URL, but this can give rise to duplicate-content problems. It's better to redirect the non-www to the www version (or vice versa).
- To help Google: Set a preferred domain in webmaster tools if your site appears on both www and non-www.
- To help users: Write your htaccess file to redirect the non-www version to the www one.
- Help yourself: Read up about canonicalisation and make sure that SOMETHING appears on the non-www version.
But don't just leave awful messages or blank pages ... (and in case you're wondering why it's 9 sites, it was 10 but http://johnlewis.com seems to be working now!)
Eurgh, this is a pet hate. As are sites that return error messages if you leave the trailing slash off a URL. I always feel like emailing to say "I'm far too lazy to type a '/' each time, so please fix this." It takes all the fun out of guessing URLs.
If it doesn't make you go eugh more, you'd better check out my linked in / 404 post - the opposite happens there. If you add a / you get a horrid error.
Pet hate of mine too. Some of the clients we have we dont control the domain suffer the same problem. After weeks of trying, you just give up.....
You can add royalmail.co.uk to that list. Incredibly annoying.
A lot of registrars do not recognize the non-www domain either. I have been using Telivo and want them to 301 redirect the non-www domain, but they just say they don't support this!
Interesting analysis Malcolm. Interesting to see we're in 2010 and only two of the sites seem to have fixed their canonical URL issue.