Question about setting up both www and non-www domain names

Question

I had a droplet set up running off an IP address and I needed to add a domain to it.

I added say ‘www.foo.com’ using the domain control panel.

My client also wanted ‘foo.com’ to work and I was in a hurry, so I simply added that domain as well.

Now both work fine (there aren’t any redirections).

Reading back over the DNS documentation however, I see that I apparently shouldn’t have done it that way. The correct procedure is to have added the bare domain foo.com and then added the www version as an alias?

What are the advantages to doing it that way? What’s wrong with what I did? Have I set myself up for problems in the future?

rascul · Answer

www is often added as a CNAME but it will work as A also.

Udit Patel · Answer

If you don’t setup redirections to non-www to www. OR www. to non-www. So in that case there is possibility that search engine indexed both non-www. and www. URL and it’s create big mashup. Read below article by matt cutts SEO advice: url canonicalization I hope this will help you For Nignx: #run this command# sudo nano /etc/nginx/site-available/example.com #copy and paste below content# server { listen 80; server_name 123.456.789.10 example.com www.example.com ; return 301 http://www.example.com$request_uri; } Using this you can redirect your example.com to www.example.com

nathanq · Answer

Adding to @hackosphere answer, the site failed to load when I tried duplicating the server name and returning the 301 to itself. Separating them to two directives does the trick. server { listen 80; server_name 123.456.789.10 example.com ; return 301 http://www.example.com$request_uri; } server { listen 80; server_name www.example.com ; }

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Question about setting up both www and non-www domain names

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Question about setting up both www and non-www domain names