Comments on: www vs no-www and cookies

By: David Jenyns

David Jenyns — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:45:10 +0000

Thanks for pointing out this area of inquiry regarding www or no www. This information is something that a lot of newbie and seasoned Internet Marketers will surely benefit from. You hit the nail in the head when you say thought about posting your opinion on a topic like this.

It’s a must to build links back to your website and do it consistently. For example, you’re building a whole lot of links back to your website and using the url as the anchor text for those links. In my opinion, it’s important if you still remember that there are used you are consistent and always use the www version. – although you can still link back to your website without these www, and mightl still work, it’s not a good idea for SEO reasons.

That said, I would choose the www version when building links because these search engines see both pages as two separate versions.

It would also be a great help if you can chat to your webmaster about these concerns immediately. This is to properly funnel the links pointing to your site bearing the preferred domain

Cheers,
Dave

By: Alexander Vassbotn Røyne

Alexander Vassbotn Røyne — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 23:45:06 +0000

I am struggling with the problem here. I have a CDN on the same domain as my blog, but that will not help, thanks to badly written 3rd party scripts, such as Google Analytics, Disqus and what not. When will they start to comply with simple standards?

Take Analytics for example, if I wanted to have statistics on subdomains, then there shouls be an option for that, same as an option to set cookies for top level domains..

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:13:10 +0000

If you use Google Analytics, then the cookies that provides is via *.example.com – so, as per their tutorial page, you’ll *have to* use a separate domain name for static files if you want to keep it cookie-free (at least pre-asynchronous tracking anyway).

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/request.html#ServeFromCookielessDomain

By: Stuart

Stuart — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:07:44 +0000

Alternatively you could use a separate domain-name for static files.

By: Mathias Bynens

Mathias Bynens — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:03:32 +0000

Just to be clear: you should of course redirect to the variant of your choice, i.e. if you want to use no-www, you should redirect from yes-www URLs and vice versa.

By: Mathias Bynens

Mathias Bynens — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:59:08 +0000

Interesting research! However, I can’t help but feel like you’ve drawn the wrong conclusion. Saying using www in your URLs is part of the solution is simply incorrect.

Obviously, it’s a bad idea to allow a web page to be visited by two distinct URLs, i.e. http://www.phpied.com/ vs. http://phpied.com/. This article names one of the reasons (no-www cookies may not be read when a user switches from to www and vice versa), but obviously there are other reasons, such as SEO (search engines will see both URLs as separate documents) and uniformity. In a way, you could even say making a choice between www and no-www and sticking to it, prevents users from getting confused.

TL;DR: Just make a choice between www and no-www and stick to it. Problem solved.

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:39:44 +0000

Denis, when you use the HTTP protocol, you are on the World Wide Web which is a part of the Internet. Are you trying to say that a website is not part of the World Wide Web? The World Wide Web is a combination of http, html, and browsers – invented by Tim Berners-Lee. I’m not sure what you are getting at as including www would just enforce the fact that the website is part of the World Wide Web (which is true). And yes, I’m familiar with no-www.org, and I support it only because it is faster to omit the www, not because it doesn’t make sense to use www.

http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2002/Web_vs_Internet.asp

By: Yao Uno Igor

Yao Uno Igor — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:09:00 +0000

Denis, the byte length of the domain name is not the problem. When you set a cookie to a top level domain like whatever.org, that cookie is sent by most browsers to any other server, like images.whatever.org. The images server doesn’t need the cookies, so the performance issue is the overhead of sending a cookie with every image for no reason. While some companies use a separate domain for non-HTML media, not all do. Additionally, you might want to try decaf. It’s easier on the nerves.

By: www vs no-www and cookies | PHP Readings

www vs no-www and cookies | PHP Readings — Thu, 15 May 2008 05:34:36 +0000

[...] Very good article of using cookies with domains including www and without it. Why it is important to use or not to use cookies, and some grate tips you would find in this post. One of Yahoo’s performance rules says: Use cookie-free domains for static components. This is good because the server has no use for cookie information when serving a JPEG or another static component, so all this cookie information creates network traffic for no reason. [...]

By: Stoyan Stefanov’s Blog: www vs no-www and cookies | Development Blog With Code Updates : Developercast.com

Wed, 14 May 2008 16:23:24 +0000

[...] Stoyan Stefanov has come up against one of the frustrations of web development involving cookies – problems caused by the switch from a “www.” in the host to none. He’s come up with a test to show you how cookies are set and where you can access them from. One of the implications of following the rule is related to the whole www vs no-www question. Basically you should always use www if you’re planning to use any other sub-domains and you want them cookie-free. This is because you have no way to set a cookie only to the top-level domain. [...]