Comments on: Vanity in Your Address Bar – WWW or no-WWW

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Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:11:29 +0000

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By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:46:28 +0000

I have to disagree with the 404 part of your answer.
You never have control over what a user might do. You also do not have control over how other websites might link to yours. There may not be a reason for anyone to type it in, but that will not stop some people from doing it.

If they are searching for the default content you should direct them to the default content, not a 404 page. It just makes for better usability.

By: Paul Annesley

Paul Annesley — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:39:26 +0000

Regardless of whether you include the trailing slash on a domain when linking or typing it into your browser, the first line of the HTTP request will be ‘GET / HTTP/1.1′. So there’s really only four, not six, different URLs that search engines etc will see. Of course, that’s still three too many, and the web server should certainly normalize them to a single canonical URL.

In my opinion, the add/remove www prefix should be handled by a 301 permanent redirect, and a request to e.g. /index.html instead of / should be a 404.

Some people would argue with the second point (404), but really there’s no reason fo anybody to type it in, and even if they tried, there’s a myriad of possible “defaults” like index.html, index.htm, default.htm, index.php, index.asp etc. If most of them will produce a 404, then you may as well make all of them the same.