It is often advised to use non-WWW url, so that there is less redirects and link juice does not leak, since people most often type non-WWW urls. But who cares what the user types? Links are not indexed from what user type into the address bar but what can be found on the web in form of anchor tags right? Some of those tags you got a control over (your own website, advertisement,..). The others are typed by users, yes, but they are parsed by the service, where the user types them - Facebook etc. For Facebook to recognize text as a URL, you have to use www. prefix and many other services auto prepend www too. So correct me if I am wrong, but most links, that you have no control over, are WWW variants and therefore from a perspective of SE crawler, running WWW version of your site will produce less 301s. User typing the url into his browser will get one more 301 from non-WWW to WWW, but that has no relevance to page rating.
123349
I remember reading ages ago that it's a good idea to choose either www.example.com or domainexamplecom as your main URL and then set the other one as a 301 redirect to point to your domain? The reason provided was:  Some people may link to www.example.com Other links may point to example.com  In order to not lose 'SEO link juice', the individual recommended setting up a 301 redirect from one to the other. Has this changed? Is it true? I would have guessed that Google (and other search engines) would be smart enough to whack some code in their algorithm to understand that in most cases www.example.com = example.com?
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Recently I was thinking about how websites like gmail and amazon use HTTPS during the login process when accessing your account. This makes sense, obviously, since you're typing in your account username and password and you would want that to be secure. However, on Facebook, among countless other websites, their logins are done with simple HTTP. Doesn't that mean that my login name and password are completely unencrypted? Which, even worse, means that all those people who login to their facebooks (or similar sites) at a wifi hotspot in public are susceptible to anyone getting their credentials using a simple packet sniffer (or something similar)? Is it really that easy? Or am I misunderstanding internet security?  I'm a software engineer working on some web related stuff, and although at the current time I'm not too involved with the security aspect of our software, I knew I should probably know the answer to this question, since it's extremely fundamental to website security.  Thanks!
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Other than for historical reasons, is there is reason to have “www” in a URL?  Should I create a permanent redirect from www.xyz.com to xyz.com, or from xyz.com to www.xyz.com? Which one would you suggest and why?
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Every now and then, I edit another user's question or answer and encounter something along the lines of the following in the post source: Help, I need this question solved with these things:&lt;br /&gt; &lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;Item1&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Item2&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Item3&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;br /&gt;  Can you guys help me with this? Oh and check here also &lt;a href=&quot;vagueurl.com&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;  Thanks!  Of course, it works, and it renders properly on the question's page... But... it's a real pain to edit and keep the HTML formatting clean and valid. Furthermore users that are not known with HTML and want to edit a post, might have difficulty to do so. For most SU/SO/SF users it probably won't be too big a problem but I can imagine users from ,  or any other SE site being like &quot;What the hell is this?&quot; If you just stick witk  and at least use its full potential, you'll be using a standard that every user should be able to understand. It will also make the post structure a lot more clear. For example: Help, I need this question solved with these things:   - Item1  - Item2  - Item3  Can you guys help me with this? Oh and check here also [Here][4].  Thanks!    [1]: http://vagueurl.com  Honestly, I don't know why . I understand that not every tag that is allowed has a MarkDown replacement, but tags like the &lt;ul&gt;, &lt;li&gt;, &lt;h1/2/3&gt; and the &lt;br /&gt; should at least be discouraged. We could for example display a warning similar to the &quot;This question seems subjective and will most likely be closed as off-topic&quot; that is shown when certain tags are used. For example something like the following warning could be shown when the &lt;br /&gt; tag is detected:  You seem to be using the &quot;&lt;br /&gt;&quot; HTML tag to create a new line. Stack overflow uses  to format posts, please use a blank line to create a new paragraph or a double space &quot;  &quot; to create a new line. For more help, please visit our .  So, for the TL;DR people: Why HTML in posts should be discouraged in my opinion:  Standardized formatting will make post editing easier and more clear in structure. Standardized formatting prevents weird and invalid HTML. The MarkDown editor used by SE does not &quot;support&quot;/use HTML formatting to insert images/links. I'm not saying HTML usage should be banned, but rather that HTML is discouraged as much as possible.  What do you guys think?
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When one wants to refer to some part of a webpage with the "http://example.com/#foo" method, should one use  &lt;h1&gt;&lt;a name="foo"/&gt;Foo Title&lt;/h1&gt;   or  &lt;h1 id="foo"&gt;Foo Title&lt;/h1&gt;   They both work, but are they equal, or do they have semantic differences?
7404
Related:  |  |    Ban URL shorting services from being used in questions/answers. I have three major reasons to request this:   It's abused to hide LMGTFY-Links (interestingly, this behavior ranges from the 20 rep Newcomer to the 50K User) It's used for inlined links, which negatively affects usability (I can't see where the link is taking me) It's used instead of proper formatting   As requested by ChrisF, a few examples of misuse (all removed by now):          Update as of 19th Aug '13: In the light of the recent , Id' like to suggest to reconsider the stance on this.  Those spam attacks are mostly enabled by the fact that the spammers can hide behind shortened URLs (goo.gl in this case), making blacklisting of the original URL impossible. Banning at least the most well-known services would force spammers to use their original URL (or would block the attack as a whole), making it easier to directly target them.
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, we  what the , and they're pretty simple.  Namely, it can be summed up in a single sentence.    For example, if I were to incorporate and register the hopelessn00b.com domain, my internal AD forest should be named internal.hopelessn00b.com or ad.hopelessn00b.com or corp.hopelessn00b.com.  There are overwhelmingly compelling reasons to avoid using  or , but I'm having a hard time finding similarly compelling reasons to avoid using the root domain (hopelessn00b.com) as my domain name and use a subdomain such as corp.hopelessn00b.com instead.  Really, the only justification I can seem to find is that accessing the external website from internal requires an  A name DNS record and typing www. in front of the website name in a browser, which is pretty "meh" as far as problems go.  So, what am I missing?  Why is it so much better to use ad.hopelessn00b.com as my Active Directory forest name over hopelessn00b.com?  Just for the record, it's really my employer that needs convincing - the boss man is back-peddling, and after giving me the go ahead to create a new AD forest named corp.hopelessn00b'semployer.com for our internal network, he's wanting to stick with an AD forest named hopelessn00b'semployer.com (the same as our externally registered domain).  I'm hoping that I can get some compelling reason or reasons that the best practice is the better option, so I can convince him of that... because it seems easier than rage quitting and/or finding a new job, at least for the moment.  Right now, "Microsoft best practices" and internally accessing the public website for our company don't seem to be cutting it, and I'm really, really, really hoping someone here has something more convincing.
30734
Say I have a web shop with a product (optimus-prime), in a category (superheros) such that it has the URL:  www.example.com/superheroes/optimus-prime   Now I want to prepend the product ID (99) to the product name in the URL, so that the URL becomes:  www.example.com/superheroes/99-optimus-prime   In regards to SEO, specifically Google search rankings, does it make any notable difference when using one product URL over the other?  As a programmer, I prefer using the URL with the ID in it because it makes system alias generation 100% fail safe for CMS routing purposes.
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Does it make any difference to SEO ratings what-so-ever if your url has a trailing slash:  http://www.example.com/some/slug/paths/   as opposed to one that does not:  http://www.example.com/some/slug/paths
2358
Lets say I have a domain already, for example www.automobile4u.com (not mine), with a website fully running and all.  The title of my "Website" says:    &lt;title&gt;Used cars - buy and sell your used cars here&lt;/title&gt;   Also, lets say I have fully SEO the website so when people searching for the term buy used cars, I end up on the second or first page.  Now, I want to end up higher, so I go to the google adwords page where you can check how many searches are made on specific terms.  Lets say the term "used cars" has 20 million searches each month.  Here comes the question, could I just go and buy that domain with the search terms adress, in this case www.usedcars.com and make a redirect to my original page, and this way when people search for "used cars", my newly bought domain name comes up redirecting people to my original website (www.automobile4u.com)?  The reason I believe this benefits me is because it seems search engines first of all check website adresses matching the search, so the query "used cars" would automatically bring www.usedcars.com to the first result right?  What are the downsides for this?  I already know about google spiders not liking redirects, but there are many methods of redirecting...  Is this a good idea generally?
23875
What does double slashes often found in URL's mean exactly?  For example:   http://www.example.com/A/B//C/   Please note that I'm not referring to the beginning right after http:.
35578
Possible Duplicate:          Maybe this is more for SuperUser website, but as it appears all stack exchange use the same approach I'll ask it globally.  On posts, we can add links to external websites. The link to the various external websites are a light blue with no underline (I mean the HTML a href link). Now, underline in the world of HTML = a link!! Simple as that. Don't get me wrong, I'm a web dev/designer and I rather not use the underline (it's nicer on the eye) but I can't comment now on the amount of time I've replied to a post to only realize I've missed the link in the original question! Well, not only have I waisted the OP time by having to re-alert me I'm repeating his data, I've been marked down (well, it is my fault!) but worse, I may have spent a long time researching the answer!  I also know it could be my screen calibration etc, but, on SuperUser could we either have a darker colour or a rule so links are underlined through out?  EDIT As per Frédéric Hamidi , this has been asked before, but it was asked in 2009 so I'd like this to be a new consideration (if possible).
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Our site's navigation links are currently in relative form:  &lt;a href="/section"&gt;   The SEO company I mentioned in my  recommends we change them to absolute links:  &lt;a href="http://www.ourpage.com/section"&gt;   This is to "ensure search engines get the correct and working URL for the pages". Is this really something that should be taken into account or is this another case of extra work with no added benefit?
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I read somewhere that web designers' habit of placing a default "follow" link in the footer of their client websites is bad for SEO.  Is this true?  If so, should we use rel="nofollow" instead.  I have seen rel="designer" in some free WordPress themes.
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Does anyone know of a script that can select all text references to URLs and automatically replace them with anchor tags pointing to those locations?  For example:  http://www.google.com   would automatically turn into  &lt;a href="http://www.google.com"&gt;http://www.google.com&lt;/a&gt;   Note: I am wanting this because I don't want to go through all my content and wrap them with anchor tags.
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I know there are similar questions to this, but they either did not cover what I was looking for or I did not understand them fully, therefore I am asking this here.  My situation  At the moment I am using rel prev and rel next as pagination.  &lt;link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/category/blablabla/page/2" /&gt; &lt;link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/category/blablabla/page/4" /&gt;   I currently also add a canonical link which refers to the first page, i.e:  &lt;link href="http://www.example.com/category/blablabla" rel="canonical"&gt;   The problem  The situation is like this:  The first page has only 20 items (as all other pages do).  With this canonical link i.e to the first page, only the first page gets indexed by Google.  I would like all the pages to get indexed because important content might get lost if they are not indexed.  Should I just change the canonical link to the current URL? i.e the current page, in this case:  &lt;link href="http://www.example.com/category/blablabla/page/3" rel="canonical"&gt;   Or should I do something else, if yes, then what would it be?
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We're a web design company that have created several websites for clients, all of which have a back link to our own website. I was just wondering the best strategy for this:   Should the keywords be in the title, alt and link text? E.g &lt;a href="domain.com" title="keyword"&gt;Keyword&lt;/a&gt;? Should we make the keyword the same on all the client web sites? Should we incorporate our company name as the link text?   Are there any other general things I should follow?  UPDATE: Currently we have "designed &amp; built by ". Are we better off having something like ""?