PR with/without www.

[domainer50]

Im looking at a name on an auction site. The PR with the www is only 2 but the PR without the www. is a PR 6. Why is that? Please explain anything you can on the topic I am very curious

EDIT-Also, why is one more important than the other?

 

[Sleepys]

I am curious about this as well.

 

[Daniel]

www. and none www. are different sites technically.

Ensure you do a 301 redirect (typically with .htaccess) to whichever you prefer, whether it be www. or not, to ensure you keep all your Pagerank in whole place (This will also ensure the PRs are the same)

:tu:

Dan

 

[Peter]

Google treat www.domain.com as a different page than domain.com.

If most links into a site point to the non www. domain then that is what will get the PR.

 

[Pred]

very interesting. thanks guys

 

[Sleepys]

The real question I am interested in is whether or not one is more important than the other. I ahve heard that the ranking with www in front is more important than the ranking without. Is this true? If so, why?

 

[Daniel]

The real question I am interested in is whether or not one is more important than the other. I ahve heard that the ranking with www in front is more important than the ranking without. Is this true? If so, why?

Not true, at least not in Google's eyes.

 

[Peter]

Daniel is correct there is no reason why a search engine would rank 1 higher than the other all else being equal.

Going back a few years it may have been the case as www. indicated that a website was present at the address but that is not the case any more.

 

[Sleepys]

That is actually what I thought.

 

[DomainMayhem.com]

Even more weird than technically having two "domain names", you can have two sites for them as well (by having both index.html, and Index.html in lower-case and capitalized "i" ftp'ed under the same name at your hosting service).

 

[Peter]

Even more weird than technically having two "domain names", you can have two sites for them as well (by having both index.html, and Index.html in lower-case and capitalized "i" ftp'ed under the same name at your hosting service).

You could if you wanted but you would need to specifically set up the web server software to do that.

If you meant it is weird you can have 2 names the same but different case this is indeed correct on a unix/linux machine (file names are case sensitive) but not on a windows machine.

 

[gawnd]

you should always add the following code to your htaccess file to ensure you don't run into canonical issues with google.

Following case is redirect of non, www to www. You can of course do it the other way if you like.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

 

[domainer50]

But the main question is simply. If you have a PR 6 with no www and your www score is a PR 2. Does that matter?

 

[Peter]

No it does not. Be advised tho do not purely buy a domain because of it's PR. Also if you are taking it into consideration ensure that it is not faked.

 

[DomainMayhem.com]

You could if you wanted but you would need to specifically set up the web server software to do that.

If you meant it is weird you can have 2 names the same but different case this is indeed correct on a unix/linux machine (file names are case sensitive) but not on a windows machine.

I accidentally uploaded an index file with the I capitalized, and it would only show up when I typed the name without the www. However, I just checked it out, and it seems that it is no longer possible to do this with simple capitalization. However, just a matter of months ago, you COULD do it without setting anything up for it.

 

[shockie]

you should redirect the pr2 version to the pr6 one. i always keep my sites with the www and redirect everything to www. in my personal view, having the www is "cleaner" and only having "domain.tld" isn't as professional... sounds weird but jmho