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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic, but what happened to "www."? More and more sites recently seem to be going without a www subdomain.

In this case, "www.jgthms.com" goes to a Gandi parking page. (!) In other cases, the connection simply times out or the server returns an error page.

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My understanding is that the number of people who like leaving off the www exceeds the number who remember to redirect all requests correctly. I believe the nginx server block would read something like:

  server_name www.website.tld;
  rewrite     ^ http://website.tld$request_uri? permanent;

Use return instead of rewrite.

    server {
        listen 80;
        server_name www.website.tld;
        return 301 http://website.tld$request_uri;
    }

Please back up your claims with a reason - all you're giving us is a different way to do things here.

http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls#Taxing_Rewrites

SEO. And it's just one reason.

What does SEO have to do with this?

It counts as duplicated content.

A 301 is a redirect. It sends to the client the instruction to reload the page in the given Address.

A rewrite happens only on the server side. So for the client it's like two different sites with the same content, and this hurts your ranking.

Now... Ok that I didn't explained that on the parent post (didn't thought it was needed), but is it enough reason to a downvote? :P

edit: fixed grammar.

Rewrites in nginx are redirects.

Only a subset of rewrites are redirects. A common usecase for rewrites is to change the request URI to make it match another location block in your config, but without returning 301 or 302 or any other redirect code to the client.

http://no-www.org/

  We've also generated at least two direct competitors:
    http://yes-www.org - A site that suggests that all domains have www. subdomains
    http://extra-www.org - A site that suggests that all domains have two www. subdomains. (www.www.domain.com)

Fantastic. That is old-school internet humour.

Gandi has a simple redirect/forwarding option in their management panel which handles this kind of thing, so it looks like he's overlooked that?

http://wiki.gandi.net/en/dns/zone/www

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