Inbound links - some to www.example.com and others to example.com?

[iMarketer]

I was checking the inbound links on my site the other day and for whatever reason I punched in the domain two different ways. Once, with www.example.com and the second time as example.com.

One way it came up with around 250 links, the other came up with around 850!

Why the great discrepancy, and what can I do to get everything on the same page? Am I losing PR because these links are split?

[edited by: phranque at 7:46 am (utc) on June 12, 2008]
[edit reason] examplified urls [/edit]

[newviewit]

They are treated as 2 seperate addresses. I would login to your host and put a redirect so it's all under one address (the one with the most links)

[StoutFiles]

Put this in your .htaccess file.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

[edited by: phranque at 7:46 am (utc) on June 12, 2008]
[edit reason] examplified urls [/edit]

[iMarketer]

Thanks guys. I found out it is the example.com that has more links than the www.example.com. Does it matter which one I centralize around? Also, by doing the redirect am I still making use of the inbound links, for SEO purposes?

IE - I know if someone clicks on the link it will come to me (still does right now anyways) but will the SEs add those two batches of links together for me? I kind of doubt it...?

[edited by: phranque at 7:48 am (utc) on June 12, 2008]
[edit reason] examplified urls [/edit]

[StoutFiles]

If you have the 301 redirect which it is then yes, the SE's will add them together.

The standard leans toward the www. in front, but I believe either way is fine.

[iMarketer]

Yeah, I would kind of like to centralize around the www as that seems to be what most people are familiar with. I guess if I put a redirect on there it doesn't really matter which one I choose, right? It's not like it has to work any harder if there are more or less links involved.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], iMarketer!

[iMarketer]

Hmm... okay, so the site is a blog, on wordpress, and I'm using the Redirection plugin... it basically overwrites my htaccess file. So I put in a redirect from http://example.com to http://www.example.com and then when I try to load the site Firefox gives me this great error saying that the server is creating a loop....

any ideas why that is?

[edited by: phranque at 8:09 am (utc) on June 13, 2008]
[edit reason] examplified urls [/edit]

[g1smd]

The order of the instructions in .htaccess is important.

You also need to make sure there is no unwanted interaction with any of your existing redirects and rewrites.