Colour me confused. I've been using the back link tracker here for a while now and have noted strange numbers between my url with a leading www and without it. For the longest time, both had a PR of 0, the same number of backlinks and the same number of 'pages in url'. I finally got a PR of 5 on both of them but then the number of 'pages in url' was varying greatly for the check without the www. Now, the 'pages in url' is greater without the www but the backlink count has dropped to 0 and the page rank has dropped to 1. I realize that in the grand scheme of things, this is probably meaningless but curiousity has got the better of me. All the backlinks for my url with the www actually contain the www... Could anyone clear the fog for me? TIA.
domain.com and www.domain.com, just like subdomain.domain.com are regarded as different sites by Google, hence getting potentially different BLs etc. Best practice is to 301 re-direct one to the other so if a webmaster mistakenly links to the non-www version it won't hurt you.
That's what I was thinking of doing this morning. What I'm wondering about though, is where those backlinks were coming from on the non-www version. I'm guessing (based on the belief that the tracker uses the google link: lookup) that google was actually returning the www version links for the non-www version occasionally?