- Del Grady

At the end of the day, for stuff like this, the search engine will need to do what is HUMAN FRIENDLY. It’s a usability thing for the most part, and, since it is the SE’s job to help us find stuff, chances are they are going to be able to recognize what is usable.

Subdomains and subdirectories are technology decision first and a usability decision second… SEO decision, huh?

Build a site that works well for your business, trying to strategize for stuff like this just makes it sound like you are trying to game the system…

As Matt Cutts confirmed to me, subdomains are still considered unique entities to Google, which means if you followed a strategy of spreading out your content over many subdomains, you would greatly dilute your top level domain (TLD). So, instead of having one high authority TLD with tons of great content, you will have a diluted TLD with diluted subdomains. That is not a good strategy.

If you’re concerned about humans, then use a short URL redirect system. Because the only humans we’re talking about that need human-friendly URLs are the ones typing them in manually from a print publication. Because on the Internet, links are links are links…and it doesn’t matter what they look like to a human.

There is no problem with promoting both versions, just as long as one of them serves content and the other is a redirect.

Shame on the amazon.co.uk example, above. Both versions work, and neither of them redirects. They have a massive Duplicate Content issue on their site:

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site%3Awww.amazon.co.uk

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site%3Aamazon.co.uk+-inurl:www+-typepadwidgets+-inurl%3Aaffiliate-blog

There’s some http vs. https issues lurking too.

Which is better, the WWW version or the non-WWW version? If you follow Seth Godin and Aaron Goldman, you’ll go with the human-friendly URL and use the non-WWW version.

But is it? Does it honestly make a difference, as long as both sites point to the same location and the redirects have been correctly written? From a human perspective, one choice or the other is never the best choice: having both options function is easily the better choice, simply because it allows for both possibilities.

Not saying “www” is definitely the more user-friendly means of speaking, since it’s a pain in the arse to say. But from a practical perspective, I’m firmly of the opinion that it’s entirely irrelevant to the user whether they’re on a www subdomain or not.

I don’t know about other people, but I don’t tend to guess that sites have subdomains to goto areas of a site. I don’t type in books.amazon.co.uk, I type in http://www.amazon.co.uk and click the link. And I’m quite happy doing that.

In order to go typing subdomains, you need to kow that they are using them, and know what they are….

Considering the number of people who type full url’s into search engines, I hardly think there’s a universal understanding of subdomains.

And for the same reasons I’m quite happy with http://www.
Sure it’s a bit redundant, but I think it gives people a visual clue, and is something a lot of people expect.

Even here in the office, someone will ask where a site is, and they will start of going “OK, so http://www., then?”, and we probably say “No, no http://www.”, because it’s setup on a subdomain for building. And that’s people involved in the web world.

On printed stuff, it’s often quite easy to find the web address of the company by looking for the tell tale http://www. and going from there.

Overall though, I really don’t think using http://www. or not is that big an issue, and tend to go along with Google, just be consistant.
Even if you decide to drop the http://www., you’d be mad not to have a redirect from http://www. anyway, to catch all those people who expect it.

I prefer no http://www. the www is a waste of one’s breath in my opinion and I don’t think there is an advantage of the www as long as you are canonically correct. Thanks for the good read.