I want your opinions on use of www

Lets say

http:// www .domain.com
and
http:// domain.com
are the same site

site:domain.com lists some pages with www and some without www

from my knowledge google did not penalize for duplicate content for existence of both www and nonwww since site is not dropped from index.

But PR has dropped from 3 to 0 on the main page on the last google PR update

What would you do to optimize site ?

301 redirect www > nonwww ?
301 redirect nonwww > www
not use redirection at all

Is it important that all backlinks to site are of the same type www or nonwww or it does not matter ?

Thank you

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The site I am interested in is http:// hausfay.com if you need to know

 

It matters i recommend putting simple code in your htaccess file to get this purpose.

RewriteEngine On
     RewriteBase /
     RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yoursite\.com [NC]
     RewriteRule ^(.*)  http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Code (markup):

 

Consistency one way or the other helps in the long run. However, you can't always control how others link to you, hence Mong's point and assistance.

 

I don't think that there will be any effect by using http://www.domain.com and only http://domain.com. I think whenever you aer doing link building activity using www.domain.com will be better.
You can view qualispace site with www and without www. showing PR=5

http://www.qualispace.com/ = 5
http://qualispace.com/ = 5

But the cache result of qualispce shows link http://www.qualispace.com/

You can view your cache also showing:
This is G o o g l e's text-only cache of http://www.hausfay.com/ as retrieved on 18 Apr 2006 23:17:41 GMT.

 

Yes, Matters a lot. The .htaccess will help people who browse to your site
and any other parsing that you do.

For SEO purposes the www. is treated as a completely separately so you will lose backlinks if your not consistant.

 

@Mong

I had already put redirection on through htaccess but my redirection is
from www. domain.com > domain.com
Is there a real problem in this choice ?

The only way I chose this is because I usually create links with domain.com which i prefer, but recently some of links that people created are www .domain.com could that be a reason for my PR drop

 

I do not think, that could cause the problem. With 301 redirect, PR should be passes correctly.

 

without 301 redirect, i think you'd get one low pr for each version, www and nonwww. it's pretty much wasted pr.