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Read information on the No-WWW website to learn why it's important to not
use the WWW portion of a domain name.

Explain how to use an .htaccess redirect command to redirect all
http://www.example.com traffic to example.com using this code (instructing the
reader to replace example.com with their domain name.)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^example.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Note: This .htaccess method of redirection requires Apache Mod-Rewrite
module enabled.

Finally, example how to define 'preferred domain' using Google Web Master
Tools and why that matters.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^example.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

redirect all http://www.example.com traffic to example.com

A more technical explanation is that the “WWW”  is an abbreviation for “World Wide Web”, a complete set of documents residing on all Internet servers that use the HTTP protocol. All popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. The browser software prepends the 'http://' onto the requested URL and automatically connects to the HTTP server on port 80.

Web servers should display their pages though the main domain name, (insert) i.e., www, (end insert) unless a particular subdomain is required; the use of the www subdomain is simply redundant.