to www or not to www - in google land

Okay...

So, something is haywire with my site and google. Recently, via the Google toolbar, my "www.domain.com" lost PR, not us a 0, but all together, a big fat n/a. My "domain.com" still has the same PR. My "www.domain.com/forums" has page rank has a 3 point higher page rank than "www.domain.com/forums/index.php". GO FIGURE. Same page.

What I have noticed is Google no longer is caching "www.domain.com", in fact if you do a "inurl:www.domain.com" it just shows the forums, my main page does not exist anymore. But inurl:domain.com, it shows up.

What is going on? All incoming links that I am aware of link to "www.domain.com" and not "domain.com". Do you force everyone to use a given domain, this way you don't have duplicate content in Google cache?

 

Can you post the URL of your site, its difficult to tell from the info you posted.

 

Actually, those are two (2) separate and unique URLs.

I would suggest redirecting, via 301, one URL version to the other.

 

I have setup a mod_rewrite to redirect any domain.com to www.domain.com. So, hopefully that works out. Did the 301 type. I have over 200,000 urls cached.

 

Here is the perfect code to use on apache of course


Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

That will send any request for any page on one domain, directly to the other.

 

Will your code not give any 301/302 errors then?

 

Here is what I am using now:

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

 

The code I posted will give you a 301 redirect in a header check.