Redirecting non www to www?

Question

Will search engines see the non-www as a different domain from the www version?Whether it is a must to put redirection for non-www to www?

Regards, Rekha http://hiox.org

Answer 1

ex. google will see this as two different websites. if your webserver is apache you can put a redirection in your .htaccess file to fix this.

Answer 2

Google Sitemaps, by the way, has an option to mention your preferred location (w or w/o www).

Answer 3

Search engines usually do. But with Google Webmaster-Tools you can tell Google to treat it as the same subdomain. But browsers will hanlde it diffrent e.g. for cookies, so you should redirect it using a rewrite like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[^.]+\.[^.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301]