.htaccess and www - non www

[mikeusry]

Recently I have taken over a website and I made a pretty colossal mistake.  The site was properly constructed via .htaccess to a www domain.  Typically I roll without it and I made a bad assumption that the .htaccess was not previously set correctly because there were hundreds of fundamental mistakes.

After a couple of days I noticed the mistake but some of our new (non www) have picked up some solid links etc.  So now I feel that I am in a nightmare of creating redirects etc.  So should I switch back to WWW or not?  Does it matter at this point?

[mikeusry]

Thanks for the reply. There is no duplicate data. I am very confident about this and I have properly constructed 301's to the correct Canonical link. I should have laid the question out a bit better. I am clearly defined through and through to the NON-WWW address but most all of the inbound links are to the WWW link and have a 301 to them. It appears as if I am missing the link juice from the links.

[AlanMosley]

either way is ok, but not both.
at least when you have 301 redirect, people that grab your url will always grab the same version of it

[mikeusry]

Thanks guys.  I was pretty sure that is what I had to do but it is always so helpful in a predicament to get expert opinions.

Thanks again!!

[Julich]

Barry said it all.
I recommend you 301-redirect all pages without "www." to the fully qualified URLs containing "www.".
You'll get 90% of the linkjuice of existing backlinks, so just go for it.

[StalkerB]

You almost certainly want to define it one way or the other at some point.

Yes, you'll lose a little bit of power through the redirects once you've done them, but at least afterwards you can be sure all the links are going to point to the right place.

Are you better having 90+% to one or 50% to each is the question