http:// vs http://www Dup Content

[theChronic]

Hey
For a while I was using my .htaccess to remove all of the www's from my URLs because my whole site links using http://afgsdgfs. However, something started going to hell with the redirects and so I had to take off that part from my htaccess and now on my google sitemaps, my page with most pagerank is my homepage but with the www now. I was wondering if google, yahoo, or msn still penalize thinking its duplicate content or aren't able to put the two pages together.

What is the latest ordeal with this?

Peace
John

[John Scott]

Just choose a URL and go with it. Probably best to go with the "www" version.

[DotZero]

this was answered in a thread here.

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

* www.example.com
* example.com/
* www.example.com/index.html
* example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.