Is 301 redirect killing my page rank

Redirect from example.com to www.example.com

[grahamstewart]

One of the sites I am supporting has a short (3 letter) name. To make the most of this, the guy who owns it likes to promote the site address as..

http: // ?.biz

but a quick check reveals that his server issues a 301 Redirect (presumably due to an htaccess setting) and bounces browsers to..

http:// www.?.biz

So two questions...

Is he likely to be penalised by the search engines for this? Although he uses the short version, others (including myself) have created links with the www pre-fixed version.

is there a better way to handle this than a redirect? It would be nice is customers could type in either address and get the same page without any redirecting.

[jdMorgan]

My approach:

Pick one and promote that one only. 301 redirect requests for the other one(s) to your selected URL. This will avoid confusion and possible duplicate-content penalty issues. It also just makes life simpler. :)

The 301 won't hurt your PR, but splitting incoming links across mutliple domains can. It's usually not a problem when the only difference is that one has the www subdomain and the other doesn't - smart search engines usually figure that out.

Jim