How does Stack Overflow (and other web sites) remove the ‘www’ prefix when it’s entered as part of a URL?
Is it a redirect, a rewrite or something else entirely?
Update: I’d specifically like to know in the context of IIS 6
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How does Stack Overflow (and other web sites) remove the ‘www’ prefix when it’s entered as part of a URL?
Is it a redirect, a rewrite or something else entirely?
Update: I’d specifically like to know in the context of IIS 6
Firing up Fiddler, we can see that the server responses with a “301 Moved Permanently” status and refers it to http://stackoverflow.com .
Since StackOverflow is hosted on Windows 2k8 IIS7 they set up this redirect straight away in IIS7.
FYI:
a list of HTTP statuses
If you are a .NET developer you might know “Respose.Redirect” , this creates a 302 Object Moved status. Search engines like 301 status codes in this case better, because they know they should not come back to http://www.stackoverflow.com in the future.