301 redirect and sitemaps questions

[tthmaz]

Hi folks, juz a couple of simple questions that i would need some answer on:

what is 301 redirect? i heard that when as a website publisher, you should redirect your mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com everytime as the domain with www. in front of it bears more value... Is that true?

Btw, there was a time that i submitted two sitemaps to google, once for the domain without the www. and the seond with the www. I eventually took down the one with www.

So, as you may expect, there's only results showing up when i type site:mydomain.com and only 1 result for site:www.mydomian.com... i was thinking, mayb i should have juz list two sitemaps for the same site... any benefits/harm of doing that? does that increase PR or anything?

[ldcdc]

as the domain with www. in front of it bears more value...

That part is necessarily true. It depends where most links point to.

[stymiee]

Just forward all of the pages without a www to have a www using a 301 redirect:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That solves all of your problems.

[Cris]

You don't need two sitemaps. All you need is
to redirect domain.com to www.domain.com. Use
stymiee's code and you'll be fine.

[tthmaz]

Thanks guys!