Is Google Figuring out the www / no-www thing?

[complainer]

I'm now getting strange results with the link: command. Previously, I always got different results for my site if I used link:www.site.com vs. link:site.com

Now I sometimes get the same results. (I have no actual inbound links without the www) In addition, the PR toolbar used to always be zero if I went to my site without the www, but would give me my value if I used the www. Now I get it with either. Here are a couple strange results:

link:www.google.com = link:google.com (about 341,000 results)
link:www.apple.com = link:apple.com (about 80,300 results)

but

link:www.usatoday.com (96,700) not equal to link:usatoday.com (738)
link:www.cnn.com (121,000) not equal to link:cnn.com (9,960)

The second results are more what I am accustomed to. Is Google getting smarter, or am I getting dumber and missing something here?
Thanks

[RideQ]

Im gonna take a wild guess, and say that google it only picking up the exact link posted , wheather its www.this-link.com, this-link.com.
i bet that it doeasnt pick up links like www.this-link.com/whatever in those searched when linking directly to an internal page. It just returns what you link you are looking for only.
If this makes an ounce of cents to anyone, Im amazing!
8-|

[owlcroft]

More likely is that--amazing as it may seem for such big sites--they don't have 301 Redirects in place for the "unwanted" form.

Every site operator ought to be absolutely, positively sure (via an .htaccess file entry, or whatever it takes) that any call to the "unwanted" form invariably produces a 301-Redirected call to the "preferred" form. If that is not the case, you're splitting your backlinks up at the whim of your backlinkers, because, to Google, the two forms are two different pages.

Remember that your host server will--usually, with M$ I'm not so sure--send either call to your front page. But what counts is not where you land, but how you got there. If Site A links to you as
http://www.mywonderfulsite.com while Site B links to you as http://mywonderfulsite.com, if you haven't taken steps, Google will see those as two different pages--so, in the worst case, your incoming link PR could be literally cut in half.

It doesn't matter which form you prefer: just pick one and be sure you 301-Redirect all calls to the "wrong" form to the "right" one.

[eCommando]

Google is showing different PR for www, and without www after this last update.

[megri]

Yes i have noticed google is showing differnet PR with and without www. You can check even seo-guy.com

[powerofeyes]

As Owlcroft pointed out 301 redirect is way to go if you really want to avoid any spliting of pagerank,

I do all my Link development manually and mostly I avoid people linking to me without the www.

Apple.com and google.com has a 301 redirect for their domain, If you type without www for both the domains it redirects to the www version, So the pagerank is not split,

This is one redirect version I use in my client sites,

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond "%{HTTP_HOST} %{THE_REQUEST}" "^www\.([^ ]+) [^ ]+ ([^ ]+)" [nocase]
RewriteRule . http://%1%2 [R=301,L]

When a User types with www it redirects to the without www version,


VIJAY.

[Nick0r]

Hrm, I thought you had to use RewritePermanent to do a 301 redirect in apache.