[support] With or without www prefix ...

[Earl Miles]

Jim Li wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> My first question is if there is a rule-of-thumb or 
> widely-recognized-convention on whether a site should choose to have www 
> prefix or not. Or is it simple a personal preference of the site owner?
> 
> My second question is more specific to my case. I didn't setup any url 
> redirect, so my site can be accessed by both:
> www.example.com <http://www.example.com> and example.com 
> <http://example.com>
> Now I learned that from SEO point of view, it's better to redirect one 
> of them to the other. Personally, I prefer the no-www url, i.e. 
> example.com <http://example.com>. However, the site has been up for a 
> couple years, and the two address ends up with different google page ranks.
> www.example.com <http://www.example.com>  PR=7
> example.com <http://example.com>          PR=3
> If I were to redirect all www.example.com <http://www.example.com> links 
> to example.com <http://example.com>, will that hurt my PR, say drag it 
> down from 7 to 3?

You can sign up for google and register your site; you can then tell it 
that www.mysite.com is the same as mysite.com

Then it won't much matter.