I have my website on the personal website space of my ISP with a URL of http://home.ispname.com/mywebsite. I was wondering if google would index such a URL or whether you need a http://www.ispname.com/mywebsite to get indexed. I have been unable to get a reply from the ISP on this. I have a counter on the site and only people who know the URL are getting counted. It occurred to me the site might not be "out there" after all.

Xtreme1

doesn't matter about the www

Well no just having a site doesn't mean it will get visitors ypu need to promote it as well.

i once had a site where http://url.com was a page rank of 2 and http://www.url.com had a page rank of 0, i have no clue how that works but thats what happened.. lol

Any page on the website that can be found from some other page will be crawled and indexed by the bots.

i once had a site where http://url.com was a page rank of 2 and http://www.url.com had a page rank of 0, i have no clue how that works but thats what happened.. lol

Now with and without www are considered as 2 different pages and so you have 2 PR for them as PR is for pages and not for sites.

Thats stupid, You think with the tech that google have they could come up with better software to pick up sites, and see that www.site.com and site.com are the same.

Why would you?

the correct address form is the hostname plus the top level domain (.com, .co.uk etc). The www is a subdomain of the hostname. the same as widgets.hostname.tld is for instance. So www.hostname.tld and hostname.tld could actually be individual websites

The www form of web address is taken to be the norm because of common use and no other reason.

If they are duplicates, the SEs do eventually resolve the two but there can be errors along the way and it may not be the prefered form that eventually dominates.

It makes no difference at all. Majority of my sites are optimized without the www and they outperform other sites with the www. Vice versa as well. Just optimize with or without it and stick to it.