www and non www sites

[Nova]

Why does Google see www.example.com and example.com as two different sites?

The following is from Webmaster tools
"If you are seeing no data for the site www.example.com, it may be because you have added your site using http://example.com. To Google, these are entirely different sites. If you feel like you're missing some data, add both the www and the non-www version of your domain to your Webmaster Tools account. Take a look at the data for both sites."

It just doesn't make sense? Maybe I'm being stupid but surely it shouldn't mater if you name your site www.example.com and example.com. How can they be different? can I build one site on www.example.com and another on example.com???

 

[GlasgowBob]

www.example,com is just a subdomain of example.com so yes they are different sites that could have different content.

It is used to show that it is a web page rather than an ftp server or other application (ftp.example.com, smtp.example.com etc)

Generally it is advisable to redirect you example.com to www.example.com

 

[inbound]

You certainly can, but should not, build different sites on the www and non-www version.

You should also be able to tell Google, through webmaster tools, which version you would prefer them to direct people to.

As has been said, you should use a simple redirect ( .htaccess if apache/linux server which is part of mod rewrite) to send visitors to the one you prefer. Plenty of articles on how to do that - webmasterworld.com has a good set of library articles on such things.

 

[killaclown]

in the news today

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23699681

 

[crabfoot]

I've seen this used for some cunning stunts in the past. One site I referenced, let's say www .thatsite. grot, showed the site when the www was included, but without the www, entering thatsite. grot got you an advert for the decidedly dodgy hosting company.

You couldn't make it up ...

 

[Edwin]

That's why people who say "you don't need a dedicated IP address, it makes no difference" are flat-out wrong. Admittedly, you shouldn't expect one if you're only paying a few quid a month, but being on a shared IP is like living in an apartment where the only thing people outside the apartment know is who's going in/out of the whole building. So if a drug dealer lives in on of the apartments, the whole building gets a bad reputation. By constrast, a dedicated IP is like having your own house - you're the only one living there.