I have a site that's been messed around lately (moving from a previous domain and then having to drop the redirection due to trademark laws). My sites traffic has plummetted - as one would expect - but I notice that my PR is showing 0 for www.gardeningtipsnideas.com while it shows PR5 if I check using just gardeningtipsnideas.com with out the www. Any ideas as to why this may be the case?
Because google views them as two different urls. If you have modrewrite enabled, add this to your htaccess file. RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^gardeningtipsnideas\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.gardeningtipsnideas.com/$1 [R=301,L]
One possible reasons could be backlinks pointing back to you have gardeningtipsnideas.com instead of www.gardeningtipsnideas.com
You can also go into google sitemaps and tell google which URL you think should be primary. That way you don't have to do the rewrite. Google will just transfer the pr from without WWW to with WWW. Google is smart - remember that. They CAN figure out that the two are the same.
Yes, try out this option in your Google sitemap account. The reason why you have a higher PR for the non-www domain is because people are linking to your site through the non-www address
I had the same problem before, and the reason is dmoz listed the domain without www and SE indexed the pages without www. Maybe your backlinks is pointing to the domain without www.