www and no www, redirect needed>?

[Mandala72]

Hi

How imprtant is it to implement a redirect from the non www version of my site to the www. version.

I have specified my preference for www. in google site tools, is this enough or should i use a redirect code? Will it boost my rankings at all?

Is the code easy to implemet?

Cheers

[piatkow]

I used to have a site with a host that didn't let me play with the .htaccess file. I defaulted to the non www in google and had no obvious problems.

To go the other way I doubt if it will be much of an issue. As you don't sound comfortable with editing .htaccess set it in WMT and stop worrying.

[brotherhood of LAN]

>How imprtant is it

Google and other SE's will try to figure out if there are duplicate URL issues, your step of using google tools removes an element of doubt for Googlebot. The bots/filters are fairly smart and will come across this kind of duplication often.

One of the main reasons to remove doubt/duplicate URLs/content is for links coming in which'll increase the prominence of your pages. It's generally better all round to not have duplicate URLs pointing to the same resource.

[piatkow]

Nobody is going to link to non www unless you explicitly ask, even then half will "correct" the link and put it in.

[5503landis]

I will have to respectfully disagree with piatkow that "Nobody is going to link to non www unless you explicitly ask, even then half will 'correct' the link and put it in."

I have three domains that set to NOT use "www" and I have yet to have a single backlink or reference to these sites with "www" put back into it. With that said, I do have to usually delete "www" on submissions that have the string already started, i.e., "http://wwww"