www or http

what is the different between http://www.mysite.com/ and http://mysite.com/

i currently using without the www because its easier for the people.

does it effects seo or something else ? which one recomnded?

thanks

It does not matter.

See this article. http://www.sitepoint.com/domain-www-or-no-www/ It explains why www was initially used to begin with and why some still prefer to use it.

Just don't do the htaccess section described in that article. it is not needed for dolphin. Dolphin does this automatically if you setup DNS to point the www version to your site as well which you should. Example. My site http://www.deanbassett.com is setup to use the www prefix, but responds to the non www version as well.

So you should at least make sure DNS for the www prefix points to your site. Reason being there are still millions of people that believe www should be used in a url. I do because i am one of those people that grew up when the internet was born, so www, ftp, smtp, pop3, gopher, ect all have meaning to me. But it's really all irrelevant now, and rarely are any of those other protocols ever specified in a url anymore.

ok, thanks dean

I wouldn't say ftp; I have occasionally ftp with the browser; it does have some use.

There is a difference as far as search engines are concerned. They can see each www no wwwas two different pages. Search engines try to sort this stuff out but do not always succeed. This can affect your keyword rankings because the 'value' of the page is split over two or more versions. On the whole Dolphin is very bad in this regard. 

Also, on a practical level, many types of website/page automatically create a hyperlink when a domain name is prefixed with wwwor http://. People are much more likely to use wwwthan http. So, I'd encourage people to use wwwand then use htaccess to enforce a single view of your content. 

Please excuse the double post.

As a webmaster the big thing for you to do is to choose which 'style' you prefer whether it be http:// or http://www. and, as far as possible stick to that choice.

That means telling Google in their Webmaster Tools which version you prefer to use. In addition use a .htaccess file to enforce your choice. Here is an easy article about how to do this task: http://www.thesearchguru.com/fix-canonical-htaccess.asp

On the topic though - Dolphin creates all sorts of versions of the same content, for example, on your home page you can have all the following different views of the same content:

http://www.index.com

http://index.com

http://www.index.com/index.php

http://index.com/index.php

So, unless you do something to manage this issue your home page and all the others that have similar issues (all of your pages) are having their value as seen by search engines decreased by anything up to 400% as compared to a single, canonical, view.