japanese - 2:38 pm on Jun 4, 2005 (gmt 0)

Clint,

If somebody or an automated script links to you in an adverse manner such as [silverwidgetshouse.tld...] , note the missing www and the missing trailing slash, or indeed if the links is done in this manner where a dot is applied into the url before the trailing slash such as [silverwidgetshouse.tld....] google will see all of these a totally independent urls.

Ignore the silly aside that somebody made earlier that they have always used 301 redirects indiscriminately and haphazardly to no ill effect at their very successful websites. One character even challenged me to prove that a loop cannot occur in htaccess.

Googlebot will follow these active links and they will all resolve to your domain, not your website pages. Your domain name.
Googlebot will then follow links according to the link and you could end up with 2,3 or 4 websites as far as google is concerned. Google is clever enough to know that this is almost unavoidable and will not penalize you for duplicate content. What it will do is opt to display the canonical url with the highest pagerank. Or so we are led to believe. In my experience this is not the case and disaster awaits any websites that do not resolve to just one canonical url. Your server could indeed create a temporary moved headers for the above links or the best case scenario a highly tuned up apache server in the hands of a dexterous mod re-writer can resolve all issues via a 301 header.

In a worst case scenario the door is now wide open for your website to be attacked by competitors or even penalized by google for an untold number possibilities. The most outlandish being that if another website with a higher pagerank pointed a 302 to your non www low pagerank site and googlebot followed the pointing sites serverside directive, your non canonical url will be seen by google to be a temporary url of the pointing website. Now your are a primary target for a duplicate content penalty by google's patented infamous duplicate content filter at any one of their datacenters that harvesting googlebots supply info to. So in essence your website is at the mercy of automated php, asp, and cgi scripts that are fed by link harvesters also that remove the www by default and link to you. Some will even meta refresh as a combo style redirect.
Google knows this and has victimized hundreds of thousands of websites over the past couple of years. Google also knew that only a few knew about this problem until recently and that it is highly ulikely that it will ever taint their name as a respectable search engine.

Unfortunately evidence exists that google now see a 301 as indication of instability of a website and much talk amongst webmasters has produced a general understanding that if needed to be done it is best to do it serverside and not .htaccess side. How beneficial this is only time will tell because google certainly will not say anything.

Clint, in your case your site has tanked into total oblivion. No webmaster here or at any other forum in the world knows why it tanked. We can only speculate and I would suggest you do absolutely nothing until bourbon reveals its sinister motives.
Some of the biggest tricks on redirects are now being exploited using 301 to 307 status codes. You will soon hear about major hijackings/demolitions of competitors using a 301 directive that exploits a loophole in some robots including googlebot.
Google are aware of it and see all types of redirects as suspicious. As to how google react to them only google knows. But do not worry about these ill advised 301 redirects at the moment.

If you want to resolve your non www to the www version it is best done on your ANAME RECORDS where you create the non www version to point to the www version. You will obviate google suspecting anything and it is the cleanest and safest method. Doing a 301 in the middle of the most outlandish update in internet history will play havoc on your website because google will have to recalculate everything about your site whilst it may be having problems or indeed it is a sinister update.

There are some guru's here such as theBear who can advise on a multitude of ways to do a proper 301 redirect taking into account the type of server your website is on. Don’t also forget the earlier post I made about possible detrimental effects depending on what your server is etc.
And do not forget that we are not discounting also the dastardly possible thing that google may indeed ban an ip range and if your website sits on the same server as a spammer, google will not hesitate to bring down hundreds of innocent sites just to get one. Trust me this has happened and is happening. Google will also shed no tears if its patented duplicate content filter determines that you are not the owner of your content and that a higher pagerank website with a snippet of your code is awarded precedence over you and a certain amount of duplicate content penalty will be deducted from your website and indeed your website can embark on a slippery sliding slope of diminishing reputation as far as google is concerned.

Sorry about the dismal reply. It is what the internet has become in the hands of google.

We all helped them go to the top and now we are paying the price of their success. For those of you who no longer rank in google, you would have been ranking on others if there were 10 engines of equal popularity. Bourbon would have been almost insignificant to your website. None of google update would have been given spectacular names, just updates and they certainly would not have upset webmasters as they are doing now.

[edited by: ciml at 4:55 pm (utc) on June 4, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]