Keith Devens .com

I prefer the lack of the www, myself. You end up with a shorter URI and I like breaking away from having a www like everyone else.

I've always preferred the www. form - it's just more symetrical.

I'm with Simon.

Almost noone writes www. there anymore, whenever I visit a site I type it without leading www. and if it doesn't exist, browser checks it itself. Besides, www. can still point to the address without it.

Just check up the urls of people who commented this post, 2 of 3 (and me, and yourself) don't have www. there

i would say bad change as your pages are indexed in search engines with the "www"
see text=http://www.google.com/search?q=keith+devens&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

i would keep the default url with www and rewrite the url sans www instead. This way the visitors still have both options and the spiders don't get confused.

i also just like the fact that
www.domain = www
mail.domain = mail
dns.domain = dns
etc ...

The www is a bad thing. Bad bad thing. It's redundant.

First off, the change doesn't affect Keith's site in search engines, because he automatically rewrites and redirects. The old links will still work, and eventually the new ones will trickle into search engine indexes, with him suffering no loss of SE referral traffic.

Secondly, "www" is for "world wide web" or, more accurately, "web page here"... a root domain of "nachos.com" is essentially the company website of nachos. Putting on the www would be redundant and unnecessary. It'd be like saying "There is a web page here of the company website of nachos". It's silly.

Thirdly, the www is technically a subdomain. Look at the semantics. Yes, mail.site.tld goes to the mail server of the site. ftp.site.tld goes to the ftp server of the site. Look at those sentences.. they all have "of the site" on them, so logically, site.tld should go to just "the site".

If you argued that the www.site.tld should go to the webpage of the site, what would go at the root domain? nothing? Is site.tld just nothing? The information shouldn't be repeated for no reason... you have to cannonize it if you want to be consistent, which Keith has done. Likewise, if you argued for the www, you should also realize that if that were truly consistent, all email addresses would be username@mail.site.tld as well - not a good thing.

That is why the www is silly and redundant, and I believe Keith is doing the right thing here.

most SE's will indeed without any problem find the new sites, the question is: will all of them count the links to www as links to keith....com (sans www).

Search engines and spiders are a very strange matter and my previous post was just indicating that while you might be okay removing the www, leaving it there might be a safer choice (some bots are really buggy)

Using "www.foo.com" is just a convention, apparently from the early days of the Web when the "www." signified a Web server was present. I don't think it matters which one you use, as long as you stick to one, and forward requests from the other address to the canonical one.