I did not vote for Barack Obama, but I must say that this website is a great move. I pray that it is more than lip service and that they will use it to truly listen to all sides and respond in detail to the country on decisions they are making.

They really got to the ground running eh?

Such transparency with his Agenda. I think he's already made his first big step towards change.

Done, and gets things smart.

The really cool thing is http://change.gov works too and doesn't redirect to http://www.change.gov. See, progressive leadership already ;)

They both redirect to the same page... HN just didn't realize that it's the same page.

No, they both _display_ the same page. Some sites will redirect either from the core domain to www., or vice-versa.

Personally, I’m a fan of redirecting www to the root domain, but anyway.

From an SEO stand point, this is a no no, heh :)

Superstition.

There are many "SEO experts" who swear that the opposite is true (which goes to show you the value of "SEO experts," but I digress.)

Seriously...this is web-crawler 101. I think the search engines have it covered.

Duplicate pages are bad. They cause a split in pagerank. Discount advice of anyone who tells you otherwise.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/duplicate-content-question/

I have a feeling the page rank of change.gov will be just fine, even if some googler has to hard code it.

I doubt they'll need hard code. This is a big new thing. I'm sure there'll be hella linking to this from around the Internet.

I posted the URL on Tumblr a few hours ago and already had 7 people reblog the link. That's one isolated instance. This'll be passed on quickly.

Yes, duplicate pages are generally bad, but nobody has demonstrated that having a www domain results in duplicate pages. It's a superstition.

I've the done tests myself, and never found a difference. The link you've provided suggests much the same thing -- as long as you're being reasonable in your use of subdomains, you're not going to be penalized by the search engines.

It does. If you run a site, open up Google Webmaster console or Yahoo's Search Explorer and see for yourself.

I've done exactly that, and never found a difference.

The campaign's over buddy - transitioning the office of the Presidency is a national concern, not a partisan one.

The country elected a Democrat, and a strong critic of the Bush administration. We now have a Democratic administration. Start getting used to it. It's unlawful to campaign from the White House (and thus I guess maybe from a .gov), but the campaign's over.