For those who have their own domain names, an important distinction must be made: there is in fact a difference between www.yoursitename.com and yoursitename.com (and a difference between each of these and www.yoursitename.com/index.php !)

The difference might seem superficial – it’s just a few extra letters – but it could make a huge difference in your Page Rank.

Google views these two sites as two different sites.  Technically, www.yoursitename.com is a subdomain of yoursitename.com (a subdomain is a smaller domain inside a larger one… Ex: subdomain.yoursitename.com) .

If half of your backlinks use the WWW version and the other half use the No WWW version, then your page rank will be divided between each of these… and so you won’t be getting the true page rank your site deserves.  (Oh no!)

How to Fix It

Don’t fret, here are some guidelines for how you can fix this problem.

1. Decide which version you prefer. It really does not make a difference and is totally up to you

2. Set up a 301 Redirect for the version that you didn’t choose and direct it to the one you did

That way, when someone types in the opposite version that you chose, they will automatically be redirected to the version you chose.

This will help make sure your PR is not split.

Here are directions explaining how to set up a 301 Redirect.

3. Tell Google which you prefer

You can tell Google which domain version you’d like them to index.   Once you do this, Google will make sure your preferred version is displayed in search results, and if it comes across any links to your site that do not use the preferred version, it will still count them as your preferred version (thus making sure your PR is accurate).  Of course this will only work for Google, not any other search engines like Yahoo! or Bing.