[Web] "www" does not belong on the beginning of our domain name

Tags web

"www" does not belong on the beginning of our domain name. Not all websites use www. It is making it try to access something that doesn't exist.

Please use the following for our root URLs: 

https://valencia.org/

https://valenciacollege.edu/
 

TECHNICAL EXPLANATION

Using 'www' as part of the URL means you are creating another subdomain for your website.  Much like valenciacollege.edu and atlas.valenciacollege.edu are separate websites, a subdomain signals that there is something different when you use the 'www' subdomain.  Using www.valencia.org and valencia.org says to search engines (like Google) that these are two separate sites.  For SEO purposes, it's good practice to not use a "www" subdomain as well as the root domain for the same site because it can cut your traffic in half on each site. 

Originally, the 'www' subdomain was used to differentiate between the website (www.domainname.org) and ftp (ftp.domainname.org.  As this is an outdated naming convention. current search engines (like Google) may see this as a less relevant search result.