I have my website listed in the Google webmaster tools without the "www" prefix. But for some reason according to a few different backlink checker tools I used a large amount of the backlinks I have include the "www" prefix. My question is will Google realize that all these backlinks are for my website, or will they just discard them or give them to some other site with a similar name?
In your Google Webmaster Tools account you can specify either www.domain.com or domain.com as your preferred domain. By setting this you are telling Google to count links to either version as the same. Another thing you could do is setup a 301 redirect from the www version to the non-www version. This would ensure the 'link juice' going to the www version gets transfered to your preferred non-www.
Yea I've thought about doing a 301 redirect but that causes problems with my web host. Thanks for the advice everyone. I set my prefered domain with the "www" so hopefully it wil count both the "www" and "non www" links.
Oh and Giamati. The only way I know how to set up a 301 redirect is through the .htaccess file. 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] Hope that helps you.