Necessary to redirect non-www to www?

[someoneguy]

Hello All,

I've read quite a bit on here and the Matt Cutts blog http://mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/ about non-www vs www. I''ve also read a few recent posts on here but still left a little confused.

First, my site is PR 4. We don't have many links, but the ones we do have (including internal) point to the www.example.com. You can also get to our site by typing example.com and it will not switch to the www. version. Both versions have the PR4, I just want to make sure I'm not losing any PR or juice between the different versions.

My question, would you advise 301 redirect to the www version? if so, I have Godaddy as our host, is it as simple as going into the hosting control and doing the redirect there?

[JordanJudson]

Yes it is a good idea to redirect the non-www to the www as long as the www has more links, otherwise I would suggest the opposite (www to the non-www). You just have to make a file named ".htaccess" and placing this in the document:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com/ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Then just upload it to the server.

[Cordstrap]

Jordan,

Any idea where i can find out where most of my links are pointing to, the www or the non-www version?

[RavenshoeGroup]

Use http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

Type in both urls and you'll see which one has more links to it.