So I setup GCMS and everything is excellent so far.   My one question is,  why does GCMS default to the domain name, and not with the www?

 My domain is jeftek.com.   I thought my site would be http://www.jeftek.com,  but if you go there it ends up being http://jeftek.com

 Is this a setting I am missing?  Is there any advantage to why it works this way?

I am getting backlinks to my content at http://jeftek.com already so I wouldn't want to change it, but I was wondering why it was this way, and if this was selectable?   The GCMS sites I have visited all seem to work this way so I suspect it is the norm.

Thanks,

 Jef

Your domain is yourdomain.com

Anything prefixing that, be it www. or monkey. would be a DNS + server configuration you do on your end.

I understand the host vs domain for DNS,  but  I was questioning why using GCMS,  it redirects to just the domain?  Is there any benefit?

 What if someone wants to use www. host name?

 if you visit http://www.jeftek.com,  a 301-Redirect is issued pointing to http://jeftek.com

here is the header when visiting http://www.jeftek.com

 I know I am not issuing a 301, so I believe this exists in the Global.ASAX file to do the redirect.

I'm fine with it, but I am just curious as to what benefit this is done?

<!-- Helps ensure good SEO and stops duplicate content. Many search engines treat www. and no www. as two seperate links. -->

<add key="Graffiti::RequireWWW" value="false"/>

to

<add key="Graffiti::RequireWWW" value="true"/>

Great!   That makes sense, but strange how they chose the noWWW has a default since that is the most specific.

 A couple of reasons for choosing noWWW:

1. www. does not add any value.

2. Folks who use a subdomain would always have to disable www. In other words, it is more likely the noWWW would work by default.

Thanks,
Scott

Scott, I might suggest changing the default to having www. There are only going to be a handful of people using host domains, the bulk of them will force www. They can advertise non-www all day long, but as soon as the visitor hits the site, a seamless 301 will put them at the www. This has been an ongoing topic of discussion in the search engine marketing communities and it is pretty much agreed on that www is standard and that most are going to type it and link that way too. It is an ongoing battle with marketers who have decided to strip the www. People just don't realize that you don't want the www but they add it anyway. So, until that mindset changes, which probably won't be any time soon, I use www as the default.

I have been torn on this as well, since I already see fracturing between http://jeftek.com and http://www.jeftek.com in search engines because both today resolve to my site with the same content.

 You can already start to see this in the backlinks listed for my site:

http://www.backlinkfinder.com/-URL-jeftek.com&www.jeftek.com.htm

It seems that in the default mode the content can appear as 2 URLs, with the RequireWWW, it always appears as a single URL since it's always rewritten with the WWW.

now you are making me thinkg I should update to require www to make sure it always uses the same URL format.

What I see happen in instances such as this is the site suffers a "fracturing" on a continual basis. The defacto standard has been to use www. since the beginning for the web. That is so ingrained in everything we do that to strip it flies in the face of the protocols established for its use. I look at the fracturing as kind of like taking what should be one whole and splitting it into two halves. With bots and the way various methods are used to calculate the pages authority, you may be splitting that authority score between two destinations as opposed to one. Oh, the bots will figure out most of it. The problem comes in when you have this 301 layer sitting there that has to force the non www on all requests with it. And there is a good chance that more than 50% of your inbound links are going to get hard coded with www out of webmaster habit.

I wanted to provide some more information in regards to the www vs non www debate. I started a topic at WebmasterWorld on 2008-01-06 that discussed this very topic. In the end, removing the www would not have been the best decision moving forward.

No More WWW
http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_promotion/3541604.htm

I was preparing to launch a new project without the www and I wanted to get some peer feedback first. I'm glad I did. I must have had a senior moment when I actually thought of stripping the www. :)