Quick clear up needed - .htaccess www -> non www

Ok to put it simply.

My site is http://sitename.com and some links im getting seem to be coming from http://www.sitename.com so basically i've added to .htaccess to push all www's -> just http:// and it works fine.

My question is, will this make a difference to my SERPs or "link juice" or anything? Has anyone done this before and seen. I have apparently like 1k links to the www. which I wasn't getting the juice from as it was split. With this redirect will I now have those 1000 BLs added onto my main domain?

If someone could just clear this up that would be great, thanks!

Its recommended in Google's webmaster guidelines. Or maybe it was Yahoo's. Either way I do it for my own money sites. I still have a bunch of backlinks on my www that I have the 301 redirect to the non-www . I think in Yahoo site explorer they'll always stay there. Also I believe you will lose some juice from the 301. It won't be the same as if you corrected them all and they were direct to your site without the redirect. But I'm sure you still get like 50+% of the benefit.

Thanks for the response. I'm not going to attempt to change 1000 links when I didn't even create most of them, so the 301 will have to do, even if there is some loss on the SE juice.

Thanks again

Yeah I wouldn't go through the trouble unless you it was a major part of your tier 1 links. Or a blogroll link you had that you can e-mail the blog operator to update it.

Everyone is constantly going to have people creating links to their site with and without the www, so I'm sure Google is smart enough not to reduce the juice flow much.