Whats the difference? I have htaccess forwarding http:// to http:// to protect against the 302 re-direct exploit, but whats the different? I have 6,xxx pages indexed for http:// and 4,xxx for http:// Why is that? And what should I do about it?
You're talking about http:// vs. http://www., right? from an SEO perspective, there's no difference. Just use whatever you think is most natural for your visitors to type into their browsers... But, you'd better be consistent about it, choose either one and stick to it, or else it might lead to canonicalization issues with Google, according to Matt Cutts. Canonicalization (is that a real word?) is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices (a quote from Cutts' blog.) Warkot
Here is the blog that Warkot was talking about http://mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/ if you are looking for an SEO standpoint you will want to do your inbound linking campaign with one either www. or without it. Reason being most webmasters do not have the time to do linking for both www and withouth. I also use www because there are a ton of novice searchers out there and most people type the www. I know we dont because we are a little more advanced. From other posts that matt wrote he tells us about yahoo, msn, ask and google an how they handle different versions here. 302's and how they should be handeld. http://mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/ Stay consistent with doing inbound linking to one url weither it be www or without it.