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For some reason, Google is showing SERPS to sites with and without the www.
The sites that it links to with the www seem to have a higher PR. The sites without the www have lower pagerank, especially if your incoming links are nested lower in the site and not on the main index page. But there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the madness.
For example, in this update I went from 34 to 27 incoming links. Not as bad as a lot of you had. But one of my competitors went from 28 to 8. This is what I noticed.
After the April update he had a site that linked to him. A good PR 4 site. That site and incoming link was linked off of Google as www.site.com/something/something.html and you could find that link by doing a link search for his site on Google.
Now, with this update that link is no longer showing as an incoming link for him. So I did a URL search for it www. Could not find it. Then I did a text search for it and I finally found it. And get this. Where the URL is displayed on the SERP page it now says instead of www.site.com/something/something.html it says site.com/something/something.html
The site is now a PR2 instead of a PR4 so I guess that is why I could not find it as an incoming link for him anymore.
I did a search for incoming links on my site. Most of my incoming links were linked as www.site.com instead of site.com. I did have two that were linked as site.com, but both of those incoming links were on the front page so there was no PR reduction. I wonder why some sites are now linked as www.site.com and some as site.com? This is really affecting PR and SERPS for a lot of people.
So has anyone else noticed this and what are your thoughts on the matter?
Sorry if this has already been discussed. I didn't have time to read all the update and sj server thread discussions to look for it.
I know that webmasterworld actually performs some sort of redirect on any link that does not contain the "www". I'm wondering if doing this is important to Google, if only for purposes of uniformity. Could it be considered more "user friendly"?
