Simon Willison’s Weblog

When referring to our web site in publications (or Twitter or Facebook), when is it important to provide the full URL—http://www.mywebsite.com and when should you provide just the mywebsite.com?

31st May 2012

My answer to When referring to our web site in publications (or Twitter or Facebook), when is it important to provide the full URL—http://www.mywebsite.com and when should you provide just the mywebsite.com? on Quora

You have no control over how other publications refer to your site—if you’re lucky, they might spell it correctly and check the link works before publishing (but I wouldn’t bet on it). What you DO have control over is making sure you compensate for any mistakes they make.

So, it’s critical that accessing both the www. and non-www. versions of your site do the right thing. You should pick one of them as the version that works, while the other should send a 301 permanent redirect to the one that you picked. You should redirect ALL URLs, so if you’ve chosen to publish your site without the www. anyone who visits http://www.example.com/path/blah... is automatically redirected to http://example.com/path/blah/?fo... (with a 301 permanent redirect, not a 302).