Should I delete the record of my site with WWW in it?

Question

I currently have both urls of my site listed in google and yahoo siteexplorer etc, there is some difference in the pages that are indexed.

Do I need both, or can I delete the one with the www at the start and then let it find all pages using the new url? I have already set my preferred domain in google but can not see a way to do it in yahoo.

Does this even make a diff to how they will index my site, or is it just so I can access stats etc?

My .htaccess is all set up to remove the www anyways.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If you use URL rewrite to rewrite your www-URL to your non-www-URL you shouldn't need to delete it. Then, the search engines should only list the non-www-URLs.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/url-rewriting-to-prevent-duplicate-urls.html

Answer 2

If it were me, I'd configure Apache to send 301 messages back telling clients to move to one or the other hostname.

Either hostname is fine, just pick one, and make it stick. That way, Google's page-rank will know to coalesce its databases to just the one entry, and you'll strengthen external links into your site by making it very easy for everyone to standardize when they cut-n-paste your URLs to their friends.