pr affected by dns setup?

I posted this in the main Google area of seochat then thought I should post it in the page rank discussion area as well. Matter of fact, I've heard that the following is why sites hosted at godaddy are having problems with google right now...don't know if it's true or not. Anyway, please read and reply if you know the answer...


I'm seeing the www version and the non-www version having different page ranks on lots of my sites.

I've asked our new host about this and they said:

Normally, when we setup a site in DNS we set the domainname.com as an A record to the IP address. Then we setup www.domainname.com as a CNAME pointing to domainname.com. So, on the DNS server it would appear like
this:

domainname.com A 12.345.678.90
www.domainname.com CNAME domainname.com

This essentially means that to a client (from a DNS standpoint),
domainname.com and www.domainname.com are the same site. However, this is how you currently have it setup (btw our tech did this):

domainname.com A 12.345.678.90
www.domainname.com A 12.345.678.90

This could confuse google if they are using DNS alias information to determine if a www is an alias or a different site.

My question, which method is the correct way, which is better, or are they both the same.

I am concerned that with 1 of the above methods that googlebot may think that 1 site is actually 2 different sites and penalize either, or both, for having duplicate content.

Let's call the way that our new host recommends the sites be set up, Method A

and the way that our tech set them up Method B.

Does anyone know for sure which method is best?

Most likely, it is because you have more incoming links to one version over the other. So if you have 1000 links to the www. version and only 100 links to the non-www. version, then you will see a difference in the PR for each.

That is correct, according to google the www version of my site has 18 backlinks, then non-www version has 36 backlinks. In reality, the site is 7 years old and has hundreds, if not thousands of backlinks. The www version is the one that shows up in the serps. In the old days, I used to have people link to the site using www. I changed that about a year ago, and started linking to it without the www.

Any thoughts as to which method of dns is correct, or does it matter?