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.