To WWW. or Not?

I have seen this question around many times in forums and elsewhere so I thought I would write a quick blog post about it. Which is the best www.example.com or simply example.com? And while I am on this topic I’ll briefly cover index.php/default.aspx.
So I am sure you are reading this to find out which way is the best to display your URL, and the plain and simple truth of it is, IT DOESN’T MATTER. That’s right it’s all up to your preference, it maybe a hard decision to make but you should chose one or the other, this will help out in many way and may even prevent search engines for confusing these different configurations as spam. So as you may already know I choose to keep the www. for this webpage, but there maybe certain advantages to be had by not including the www., such as it puts your brand right there in front of your visitors without anything blocking the way. Another advantage might also be that it’s easier for your mobile users by saving them four keystrokes in getting to your site.  Either way once you settle on one, you should setup a redirect so that your visitors are always sent to that one.
 
As mentioned earlier I am going to briefly cover default file names, it doesn’t matter which server you have they all will serve up the default file name when a browser makes a new request to the directory. So my suggestion is to trim that off of your URL it makes for a cleaner look, and the real bonus comes in when your visitors don’t have to remember all of that, making it easier for them to come directly to your site.
 
I suggest  that you always link to your pages internally and externally with the proper conical form of your URL. This will only help to encourage other webmasters that are going to link to you to use this proper form also. If you have your page set up to redirect properly this isn’t a very big deal and doesn’t really matter it just looks a little better if everything is uniform.
 
A few last notes before I go if your site has been up for awhile you may want to use a tool like yahoo site explorer to see which version must of your inlinks point at and pick that one. Also after implementing your redirects you will want to check them using an HTTP Header tool to make sure that they are 301 redirects and not 302s.