Does "www" matter in Page rank or back links?

with "www"= 5, without=0

[politicsandlabor]

If this has been covered in previous threads, I apologize. I couldn't figure agood way to structure this search without getting a million responses or none.

I'm a volunteer web designer. Our site has a lousy page rank (but I'm working on it!) A friendly site just added a link to our site. It checked their page rank to see how much benefit it would be and discovered an interesting phenomena:

[name_of_group_deleted.org...] returns "Page not ranked ." However, [name_of_group_deleted.org...] returns a FIVE! Adding or deleting "www" changes the PR even though they both work....

I tried it on the sites that I develop and it doesn't make any difference.

[Beachboy]

Hello and welcome to WebmasterWorld. Yes, Google does discriminate between sites with www and non-www URLs where PR is concerned. There is a solution that you can implement at your server to correct this but someone else is going to have to provide the link.

[Macguru]

Hi politicsandlabor,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld. [webmasterworld.com]

Yes it is sometimes difficult to find the right stuff in the Google forum. We are working on this [webmasterworld.com].

Brett has put up the WebmasterWorld Google Knowledgebase V2 [webmasterworld.com].

You will find the right awnswer under the [Webmasters] subtitle. Plus a lot more.

Enjoy!

[EliteWeb]

It matter for links also, For instance I have a site, when i first announced it I forgot the www so it was just like [name.com...] after 2 months it had a page rank of 3 from all the people linking to name.com without the www after time more and more links grew to www.name.com and that ranking went higher but only one result was shown in the engine, and that was the one with the higher pr.

[steveb]

Now I'm confused. Last time I checked (maybe two weeks ago) I had two incoming links to [domain.com...]
and 360 to [domain.com...]

domain.com had a lower pagerank that www.domain.com

Today they are exactly the same, as is www.domain.com/index.html -- and .../index.htm, even though I have no such .htm page.

I did nothing in the meantime. If Google did not change in the past couple weeks should I assume my host did something different that they didn't tell me about (tho I'm glad they did)?

[Chico_Loco]

Here's what to do:

If on a UNIX server forget everything you've read so far and add these 3 lines into your .htaccess file in the root directory. It requires mod_rewrite to be installed mind you but if you're paying for hosting then it damned well should be.
It will catching anything thats not "site.com" and map it to "site.com", it will also redirect to the correct page.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.site\.com
RewriteRule ^.*$ [site.com%{REQUEST_URI}...] [R=301,L]

[Hemsell]

TECHNICALLY...
WWW. is a subdomain.
just as intranet. or somethingelse.

Todd

[martinibuster]

I THINK THAT THE LESOSN HERE IS:

to be mindful of how you request a link: mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com.

If you put mydomain.com then the link is recorded as such and your effort is pretty much wasted. Unless you do the mod-rewrite thingy.

[savvy1]

Pick one or the other domain.com or www.domain.com and stick with it. be consistent. Use it in all of your internal backlinks, and use it when asking for links from other sites (if you choose to do so).

Consider mod-rewriting the other to the one you picked, but for users sake have both of them resolve and work somehow.

My opinions .. :)