For example my site name is not displayed with www but just http://xyz.com, even if i type my site name and then press ctrl + enter Why is that so ? and does that effect PR ? My PR did not get updated in this cycle even when 'link: xyz.com' shows more than 70 backlinks. (its still 0)
It will assist your pagerank if you use a redirect to point all your traffic to one URL, the canonical URL (which means the authoritative URL). For example, if you don't point all your traffic to 1 URL, you get things like this going on: http://xyz.com http://www.xyz.com http://www.xyz.com/index.html ALl 3 URLs will point to the same page, and Google may get confused and treat it as duplicate content. It also dilutes the value or pagerank of your canonical URL - which would be the 1 URL you want to make the standard one. You should pick one (I prefer www) and use redirects to make sure all 3 addresses I mentioned above all go to: http://www.xyz.com It's a bit early for me, so I hope this is making sense
The above poster is correct, those web pages are considered all different to Google's crawler even though they all contain the same data. This can dilute your links since webmasters and visitors might use different URL versions which would effect Pagerank and SERPs. Use the below code in your .htaccess file to redirect the non-www to the www URL version. Then add the second code to redirect index.html to the domain. You can view the index.html code and alter it if you have index.htm, index.php, etc. Also, change yourdomain.com to your domain name. RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Code (markup): RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L] Code (markup):