some say yes and some say no. will google or other SE penalize 301 redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com
I asked the question previously and was told the site would be banned. I still don't understand why because many people use the 301 when they move pages or move sites. Anyway, I hope others can shed some light on this.
FWIW if you do Sitemaps they will allow you to prefer one or the other so 301 isn't even needed. However I did it and was not banned.
Does anyone know the code to do this? Is it a 301, or 303 to redirect http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com making all the pages go to the right url of your chose?
Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_Host} ^domain.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301] Code (markup): USE THIS IN YOUR .htaccess file
I was under the impression that without the redirect you could get penalized for duplicate content because google will index both the domain.com and www.domain.com.
I've been redirecting non-www to www versions of my sites' pages for years and it works great. This is the first time I have ever heard a suggestion that a site would get banned for it. That's ludicrous IMO. Allowing both versions of the site to exist separately causes the benefits (PR, anchor text, etc.) of inbound links to be split between the two versions of your site (when inbound links are using both versions). The www. prefix is a subdomain just like any other subdomain you might put on your site. Well, maybe not just like any other, but from a SE perspective it is.