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Why do I have to type "www" in front of website on ie8?

For some reason, I have to type "www" in front of website, for the site to work correctly in ie8. For instance, typing "www.example.com" will work correctly, but if I type "example.com", the site won't work. Why do I need to type "www" for the site to work?


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If a website does not resolve when you type in "example.com" (without "www"), then it probably means that the site does not have it's "Host name" site bindings configured correctly to except (non-www version) requests to "mydomain.com". Instead, they probably only have configured the Host name "www.mydomain.com". Adding in a second Host name for the non-www version of a site can easily be configured using Internet Information Services (IIS) for all websites.

On the other hand, if the website is automatically redirecting from the non-www "example.com" to "www.example.com", then this would most likely mean that the website administrator configured the site to redirect any requests from the (non-www) website domain, to go to the unique address at "www.example.com". This is actually good practice, and helps a site get better SEO rankings, because having different url paths go to the same page is considered bad in the eyes of search engines. For example, the following are all considered different url's in the eyes of search engines like Google, however all the urls could potentially be setup to go to the same home page:

■ www.example.com
■ example.com/
■ www.example.com/index.html
■ example.com/home.asp

So essentially, you want to choose one url structure and use that for all urls. Take a look at what happens when you go to http://gotknowhow.com (or any page on gotknowhow.com without the "www".)  You will automatically be redirected to the "www" version of the page... https://www.gotknowhow.com (this is good practice). See the second link below to learn how to set this up in IIS7 using the URL Rewrite Module.
Source(s):
Matt Cutts on SEO advice: url canonicalization - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canon...

Redirect to WWW of a site using IIS URL Rewrite Module - https://www.gotknowhow.com/articles/how-to-redirect...
Jul 31st, 2010 at 4:41 AM
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i've got the same problem. i've to type www in front of of website in order for it to work. tried your example above gotknowhow.com wouldn't work either. Likewise if i type mail.yahoo.com it won't work on IE8. on the same pc, if i use Firefox or Chrome browsers I don't need to type www in front of a website. i think it has to do something with ask.com...
Sep 17th, 2010 at 6:02 AM
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It's a Microshaft "feature". More of the daily "bend over and grab your ankles, you're using Windoze!" The config answer is 90% right but (obviously) punts the answer that every decent browser detects the condition and resubmits with the www. automagically. MS corrected it in later versions. But, if you want to know how they get by with it, there you go. The groidly little groid knew that but spun it as misconfiguration. The engineers lie to you by omission rather than say, "It's MS; you get crap", because that's what's all over their resume.

Not that anyone using MS would care, given that you're using 1/2 your sytem resources preventing viruses and trojans, have to maintain virus/trojan protection, have the worst memory management in the business, and crap multitasking. I wrote Calculator, Paintbrush and Notepad for Windows 1.0 and it pains me to say it, but it's all true. Wish I had a recorder in '81 when we were discussing what would be called the Y2K date bug. MS' position? Literally, "Anyone using Windows in the year 2000 has a lot bigger problems than the date bug". They got one right!
May 2nd, 2012 at 12:12 AM
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