www vs. non-www using site command

Is this normal?

[TonyMc]

I'll post this over here because I really have no idea if this is normal or not.

I was looking through my logs and I noticed something that I haven't seen before. I noticed a referral from mydomain.com rather than the normal www.mydomain.com that I usually see. I went to G and found that when I do a "site" command I get different results when I use www.mydomain.com than I do when I just use mydomain.com. I've not seen this before. Is this normal or might this be a problem?

Thanks

Tony

[Webwork]

More likely than not normal.

[bill]

Here's a quote from our resident GoogleGuy that might be of interest:

GoogleGuy's posts [webmasterworld.com] msg #:7

My rule of thumb is to pick a root page and be as consistent as possible. I lean toward choosing [yourdomain.com...] but that's just me; [yourdomain.com...] would work as well. Then I recommend that you make things as simple as possible for spiders. I recommend absolute links instead of relative links, because there's less chance for a spider (not just Google, but any spider) to get confused. In the same fashion, I would try to be consistent on your internal linking. Once you've picked a root page and decided on www vs. non-www, make sure that all your links follow the same convention and point to the root page that you picked. Also, I would use a 301 redirect or rewrite so that your root page doesn't appear twice. For example, if you select [yourdomain.com...] as your root page, then if a spider tries to fetch [yourdomain.com...] (without the www), your web server should do a permanent (301) redirect to your root page at [yourdomain.com...]

[TonyMc]

What would be the best way to fix it? My host gives me three options from the panel...make both www and non-www work, always add www or always remove www. Should I select one of these options or use an htaccess file?

If an htaccess file, would this be correct...

Redirect 301 /domain.com [domain.com...]

Are there risks in doing this? It doesn't appear to be hurting me at the moment but obviously I'm concerned it might at some point.

Thanks very much for the replies. I appreciate the help.

Tony

[bill]

If the always add www or always remove www options are returning a 301 in the server headers then that's probably the easiest way.