I have a VPS with and a domain from different hosters. I would like to know about the best practices for setting up the redirects regarding SEO as I am really confused about the different options. I want everyone who access mysite.com to be redirected to www.mysite.com without having a negative impact on my SEO and I want my site to  be displayed as www.example.com in the SERPS.As far as I can tell I have the following options:Option 1 (An A record and a CNAME, no redirects)DNS Levelexample.com A record pointing at the IP of my serverwww.example.com CNAME to example.comServer Levelno redirectsOption 2 (Two A records, no redirects)DNS Levelexample.com A record pointing to my serverwww.example.com  A record pointing to my serverServer Levelno redirectsOption 3 (301 Redirect using either of the above)I can redirect the example.com domain to www.example com via htaccess.Is there any difference SEO-wise based on how I set up the DNS in this case?  Also, what do you think is the best option (or is there a better one I'm missing??
Confusion regarding SEO and a name, c name and 301 redirects
dns;301 redirect;seo
Everyone has their favorite way of doing this, so long as it's a 301 it's fine, all the methods you've shown are valid. Beyond using a 301 there is no real best practice because everyone's setup is different.This is mine, using .htaccessRewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com$ [NC]RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]It's a positive compare, basically, if the domain is NOT www.yourdomain.com it redirects to www.yourdomain.com with a 301.No messing with DNS, no matter what domain the user/bot uses to visit the site they will always end up at www.yourdomain.com. It's bulletproof, works with search engines, and you can add new domains without changing any settings.