Removed 'www' pageranked dropped from 5 to 2, help

how to keep seo when changing www prefix

[manning2]

I removed the 'www' in june and watched my pagerank plummet :(

I think one of these rules might be the culprit?
** I had the first rule [R=302, L] until october where I updated it to a 301 and thought that might be the problem, but no luck yet.

# remove www prefix
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

# remove index.php from homepage (prevents being seen as two pages)
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.php [NC]
RewriteRule . / [R=301,L]

If it matters, I'm running a wordpress site and several of my internal pages have rank of 3 and 4.

[edited by: pageoneresults at 11:09 pm (utc) on Jan. 21, 2008]
[edit reason] Examplified URI References [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

If you previously had a 302 in place, then you've essentially told the search engines to 'remember' URLs in the 'wrong' domain, and it will likely take quite some time for them to get re-oriented.

Best plan? Don't change anything about your URL-map until this gets sorted out.

Also, make sure that the majority of external links to your site are to the non-www domain, and that all new external links and all internal links are to non-www.

Also, in reference to the title of this thread, you did not "remove" anything. You issued redirects in response to requests for resources at www.example.com, that is all; The interpretation of that redirect response is completely determined by the client receiving the redirect.

Jim