Bla.st Blog recently raised the use of domain names: Which is better, using mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com?
I agree with their analysis of the problem: having two slightly different URLs under Google could in fact lead to dilution of your PR Rank. In fact, until recently IB here had this problem. Recently, my webhost attempted to solve this issue by giving its customers the choice as follows:
Both http://www.domain.com/ and http://domain.com / work.
Add “www.” if somebody goes to http://domain.com/
Remove “www.” if somebody goes to http://www.domain.com/
I have been suggesting my customers to choose one, usually the one with the higher PR rank as the default. Why argue with a good thing?
You can check your page rank for your blog name and see what happens when you enter your domain name +/- www. I don’t think it matters that much which one you decide on, but in my explorations I did notice that some versions of SMF did NOT like having two addresses. In fact when members visited SMF via the wrong URL, it produced an error. I followed my host’s advice and the problem went away, when I set it to the same as the address in the SMF configuration file.
If you get a chance, do a survey on Google Search and with your readers/customers/members to find out which is more popular or more preferred. But once you change, don’t flip back again. It could backfire!