Don’t Split Your PageRank
So what is PageRank?
There are many factors which contibute to how well you rank in Google’s search results… your PageRank plays an important one. PageRank is Google’s way of measuring the value or importance of a webpage. It is based on a scale of 1 - 10 starting at 1 (low in importance) and increasing exponentially in importance to 10 (high importance). When one website links to another, it is essentially casting a vote for this website saying “I’m going to link to this website because I think it has quality content”. Google’s automated spiders pick this up and base the importance of a web page on these inbound links. The more quality inbound links a website has, the more important a website looks to Google. To see the PageRank of websites in your browser I recommend the Google Toolbar.
Now that you have the skinny on PageRank, here is a tip that will help improve your websites PageRank.
Hopefully your website can be accessed with or without the “www” in the URL. Unfortunately Google sees the two different URL’s as different webpages.
example:
http://www.freshbooks.com/ and http://freshbooks.com/
When someone links to your website, you do not always have control over the URL they choose to use. They could include the “www” or not. Because of this inconsistency you could be splitting the number of inbound links to your website thus splitting your PageRank. The key is to be consistent and consolidate to one URL. One workaround to this is to redirect to a single URL. There are different methods of doing this depending on the technology your web server is using. A common and simple way is to manipulate the .htaccess file (this can only be done on web servers running apache). This is the method we use here at FreshBooks. If you go to http://freshbooks.com you will be redirected to http://www.freshbooks.com. Here is a thread that will get your started. Please consult with you web host to see if you have access to manipulate your .htaccess file.
Please be careful when editing your .htaccess file. We at FreshBooks take no responsibility in you bringing down your website 
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1:05 pm
Google’s webmaster tools ( http://www.google.com/webmasters/ ) have an option that allows you to set a preferred domain, as of quite recently. Might help avoid hacking at the .htaccess file
2:50 pm
Hi BJ,
Great tip! I’ve been into Google Sitemaps/Webmaster Tools briefly before and didn’t even notice that tool.
Although there is a note there that says Google doesn’t guarantee the URL you prefer will show in the search results. You could however use this tool in combination with an htaccess redirect which may further help in improving your PageRank.
But again, nice tip!
10:16 am
Redirecting your inbound links so as to consolidate your top level domain is a great idea that anyone maintaining a commercial web site should implement right from the start.
However, Freshbooks seems to have gone about it using the subdomain that should be high on everyone’s priority to drop. Namely “www”
“www” was appropriate in 1995. It was relevant in 1997. In 2000 it started showing signs of being superfluous. In 2006 it’s just completely and obviously redundant.
No one needs to be reminded that a domain name is a valid web address. The TLD (.com .net .org etc..) do that already. The “www” subdomain only serves to marr the site’s brand within the address bar.
5:29 pm
Your article summarizes the importance of avoiding splitting the pagerank for identical pages with different urls. I wrote an article about dynamically creating a 301 redirect without using a rewrite rule.
http://www.smtusa.com/blog/posts/optimize-seo-pageranking-using-301-redirect.html
I linked your article in my blog post. Great job.