I wrote about Storebrander in a prior article in pretty positive terms.
However I did have one criticism that has now been addressed somewhat with some news from the team.
Previously, I didn’t like the need to maintain both a non-www as well as a www version in order to capture all the traffic. Furthermore, I didn’t like the fact that the canonivcal references were being kept as separate domains without an effective redirect.
Sergey promised to look at this and came back to me with a fix today which works great for me. Now any non-www traffic will be directed at my www store (http://www.dvdbrowser.co.uk) with permanent redirects.
If you have both www and non-www stores in place, be careful which you delete though, as the same is not true if you only have a non-www site set up, in which case all traffic will be diverted according to the following :
If you created MyDomain.com branded store and not created www.MyDomain.com and pointed both www.MyDomain.com and MyDomain.com DNS domain names to www.storebrander.com, urls beginning from MyDomain.com are redirected to www.storebrander.com because we consider the situation is incorrect.
I think that redirecting to a non-www version is still equally valid (and is actually preferred by some webmasters), recognised in Google webmaster tools and if that is actually the Storebrander user preference, then that should also be observed.
You can read the entire Storebrander update here.
I have given my feedback on the changes to the Storebrander team. I am sure that it will not be too long before they give me some feedback too … they are nice and prompt with that.
UPDATE: Sergey has reverted to say/clarify that for technical reasons and potential coding difficulties, you may still redirect to a non-www version of the store if you wish, BUT ONLY if you do not have an equivalent www version set up on the domain. That seems perfectly fair to me.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Storebrander is really a great service. And a helpfull team.
But today all my s-stores with storebrander plus their website seems to be down though to bandwith extension.
Changed all my general redirects. But all the product links get to nowhere.
Hope they will be fine soon.
Did you ever understand their business modell?
lothar
Their business model was around selling domain names and collecting adsense revenues.
Personally, I stopped using Storebrander … not a criticism in any way, just that I personally couldn’t find time to develop the domain that I effectively parked there and I therefore ‘reclaimed’ the domain to use with another product trial.
They do seem to run into periodic problems regarding bandwidth … perhaps free is too cheap?