Redirecting in Hosting Account

[gouri]

In some of the hosting accounts for some of my sites, I have a feature that is to redirect all visitors from example.com to www.example.com

You have to check the box to have the feature.

After I checked the box and I later updated the site, when the update is finished it has a link to example.com that you can click on to get to your home page. It starts going to http://example.com and then redirects to http://www.example.com

There has been some talk on the forums lately about how Google may not like redirects a lot. Do you think this would be ok?

[tedster]

What has been discussed here recently was just a theory about some recent ranking problems that showed up on Oct 31. But a 301 redirect to keep both versions of your urls from being indexed is what Google recommends - it's a standard practice to avoid the most common canonical problem. [webmasterworld.com]

This is from Matt Cutts:

Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).

[mattcutts.com...]

[gouri]

This is very informative. I am going to go through this.

[gouri]

I noticed in my Google Webmaster that I now have one unreachable url. It is for the home page and it is stated as http://www.example.com/home.html

This is after I made the redirecting change in my hosting account.

Do you think this could be related?

I have also posted about a status code 206 that I received when looking at my web log.

[webmasterworld.com...]

Maybe this is all related. I would really appreciate if someone can help me to put this together. What should I do next?