cleanup - 6:15 am on Jul 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

Here are the details.

I used the follwowing redirect in the .htaccess file;
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^SITE\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [SITE.com...] [R=permanent,L]

It returned the correct 200 code when checked by;
seoconsultants header checking tool and others.

Each page has the following line of code at the top;
<BASE href="http://www.SITE.com/">

All references within the site to other pages are
either [wSITE.com...]
or page.htm

Lots of high PR incomming links for wwww.SITE.com both for main page and internal pages.

The site is small only 150 pages.

I think Tedster makes a fair comment above about not changing the status quo. After seeing the way Google failed to react to the 301 and the subsequent loss of all my site pages I am very reluctant to make any changes at the moment, and that includes redirecting to the non-www version.

The problem is that this is a Google bug and we simply do not have the information at hand to do the "workaround" for them.

So my advice would be;
1)New site - YES do the redirect.

2)Existing site that is OK in all respects and does not have the non-www indexed - YES do the redirect.

3)Existing site that has most or all pages non-www in the google index. - Leave well alone.

4)Existing site that has ocasional pages as non-www - Redirect on a page by page basis or redirect the whole site if you can live with the possible loss of the non-www pages.

[edited by: tedster at 2:30 am (utc) on July 6, 2006]