Do you use www. when promoting a site?

[mardigras]

Although most webhosts have it set up that it is optional to use the www. in your URL and site.com is the same as www.site.com, the www. is considered a subdomain and the index pages at www.site.com and site.com can be completely different. In fact they don't even have to be hosted in the same place and can be controlled by separate entities, best example I can think of this is

http://godhatesfags.com
which is certainly quite different than
http://www.godhatesfags.com

Depending on the domain it is often better for branding to refer to it as yoursite.com rather than www.yoursite.com and it is almost always easier to say it that way. Even so, some people will automatically stick a www. in a link when they add it to their page (or sometimes a submission form will add it) and search crawls sometime add it. I'm sure the reverse happens too, somone drops the www. on your address when adding a link even if you normally promote it with the www.

Where this is a problem is that Google can spider them as 2 separate pages. For instance:

http://webmasterfreecontent.com has a PR of 4 while
http://www.webmasterfreecontent.com has a PR of 0

even though both addresses are the same page. Would be nice if Google had an algorithm that compares site.com with www.site.com and if they are the same page they get treated as 1 and have the same PR. As it is now any links to http://www.webmasterfreecontent.com appear to be taking away from http://webmasterfreecontent.com or perhaps the spider is ignoring it as a duplicate which is definitely taking away.

Any SE gurus care to input? Hindsite 20/20 I think it's better for a site to spidered initially with the www. and include it with all link submissions, letting the end user drop it if they want. However I've noticed on some people's pages who obviously submitted using the www. that not using it when typing the address will give a 0 PR, the opposite of my situation. On a couple of my domains and a few other sites I've checked, the PR is the same with or without adding the www., I assume it depends on the webhost's settings.

Any tips to avoid competing with yourself?

[Shaze]

yes you are right..they are seen as different domains and i don't think it will change anytime soon....personally i promote my site using the www because it's more standard than without the www. it's really up to you though, but make sure you stick to one way.

[acuk]

my is use the www
keep to one formula and stick to it..

[rigrunner]

for search engines i always get http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com listed.

It's mostly noticable in Google PR

[BlueQuartz]

bounce domain.com to www.domain.com with htaccess