the usage and unusage of "www."
 

lets say you trade hard links with another webmaster.
say his site's domain is site.com

unless specified otherwise, will you link to his site as so:
http://site.com

or as so:
http://www.site.com

this question is important for something i'm doing - even though it might seem retarded

depends on the site i guess

IIRC, GoogleBot treats all these URLs as totally different:

http://site.com
http://www.site.com/
http://www.site.com/index.shtml
http://www.site.com/index.html
http://www.site.com/index.htm
http://www.site.com/index.asp
http://www.site.com/index.php

etc

I find various links to my sites that are done in both methods... some people are just to laze and some insist on the www.

There doesn't seem to be any one right choice.

Just 301 redirect any link without www. to one with it via htaccess

Take fireorange's advice. Google will then see all the pages as one and create one PR value for it.

if you opened that door, anwer me this: would'nt I lose the $_server["HTTP_REFERER"] by doing that ? i'm using a trade script and have to have that

I think you should have the 'www.' subdomain set up as an alias in the htconf.

would'nt I lose the $_server["HTTP_REFERER"] by usinga 301 ? i'm using a trade script and have to have that

I always link with the www

If you are trading and/or linking, get the URL the other site wants used and do the same yourself - tell them which URL to use for you.

No mystery, no confusions.

Getting it wrong can waste a lot of potential rank passing.

Also be sure that your server is set up correct according to what style you use for your links. If you use 'Domain.com' - make that the server name and the 'www' the alias. Most servers are set up the other way by default.

This will ensure that any URL fixups (paths without a trailing slash) will use the domain the way you want it.

-Dino

That's interesting, what trade script are you talking about?

Answer is NO. htaccess redirect do not change referer.

yup... along with a wildcard alias for anythingyoucanthinkof.domain.com

I ask what the webmaster wants. Some want with, some without.