Should I 301 my non-www accesses to www accesses?

[scanlin]

We have external links pointing to both mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com. I read this: http://www.stepforth.com/resources/web-marketing-knowledgebase/non-www-redirect/ and wondered if I should add this to my .htaccess file:

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

so that the link juice all flows to the www version of the site? Any reason not to do it?

[krissy-cca]

Mike,

This is best practice on all sites. Forgetting about the links for a minute; you have two versions of the same page (in search engines eyes) so the first step is to do exactly what you're asking and consolidate into one.

The next step is to ensure your URLs end with a trailing slash because if you have www.url.com and www.url.com/  you again have two different versions.

DD