Hi all, I'm trying to have the "www" subdomain automatically removed from my URLs. I haven't been able to get any of the mod_rewrite functionality to work (Shared hosting is very buggy about that). I had thought of an alternative way of removing the prefix, but I couldn't find anything on the net about it. What if you pointed the www CNAME to "yourdomain.com"? Does anybody know if Google would handle that correctly?
You can do that. No problem. You could also tell Google through webmaster tools, that 'yourdomain.com' is the preferred name. My sig does the same. If people type www. they are redirected to non www.
I wasn't aware of the webmaster tools method... I've only ever used the htaccess way. At the OP, you should consider moving to a different host... If it can't handle a simple rewrite command...
Google webmaster tools is only a way of complementing the htaccess file or any other way you are doing this. I was merely commenting on how Google looks at this. Google can't redirect your URL - but you can tell it how to look at it.