Help Needed: 301 redirect? to www or not to www, that is my question

[browntwn]

Okay, I hate asking questions here, as I know it must have been asked and answered dozens of times, but I can't figure it out on my own.

I have a popular site, 20,000+ uniques a day, most from google searches. That makes me hesitant to change anything, for fear of ruining something I don't understand.

I have limited knowledge when it comes to programming, I am more of an idea man.

Anyway, here is my issue. Since I didn't know any better a bunch of links on my site go to:

www.sitename.com/page.html

some to:

sitename.com/page.html

some to:

/page.html (these originate on both the www and no www pages)

I see both in my refferal logs.

ex from my stats page:
Top 30 of 15157 Total Referrers
# Hits Referrer
1 185965 8.14% - (Direct Request)
3 92314 4.04% http://www.sitename.com/
25 12206 0.53% http://sitename.com/

I first realized this was a problem when I created sitemaps for google. But I think I rigged those to work, by actually adding my site both ways, each with the same content and sitemap to google, one with the www.sitename.com and one under sitename.com.

Now I am thinking it is a bad system for PR reasons, and SEO, but I am not sure.

QUESTION 1: Is this something I need to fix?

QUESTION 2: it seems like I would need to do a simple 301 redirect from sitename.com to www.sitename.com. Is that the solution?

QUESTION 3: If I make that change, does any page that was entered sitename.com/anyfolder/anypage.html automatically go to it's www equivilent? (would the example url go here: www.sitename.com/anyfolder/anypage.html?)

QUESTION 4: Last but not least, how the heck to I do do the actuall 301 redirect. Do I need to change the conf file and then htaccess?

Yes, I did search first. I checked probably a dozen threads, these are some examples I looked at:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=76678&highlight=301+redirect+www
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=23044&page=14&highlight=301+redirect+www
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=75075&highlight=301+redirect+www


Thanks for any guidance, it is most appreciated.

[browntwn]

Nevermind. Solved it myself.

[hasitruparel]

Nevermind. Solved it myself.
can you tell me how did you solve it? i am having the same problem

[PaulMellors]

From http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

[Cryogenius]

A new feature has been added to Google Sitemaps where by you can specify your preference between www and non-www domains:

Some webmasters want their sites indexed under the www version of their domain; others want their sites indexed without the www. Which do you prefer? Now you can tell us and we'll do our best to do what you like when crawling and indexing your site. Note that it might take some time for changes to be reflected in our index, but if you notice that your site is currently indexed using both versions of your domain, tell us your preference.
Quote from: Webmaster Central Blogs: More webmaster tools (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/08/more-webmaster-tools.html)

Cryo.