GAE naked to www custom domain mapping does not work

Question

I setup a custom domain on GAE using the tutorial at aral balkan to access http;//app.apspot.com at http://app.com. (I can access the app at www.app.com)

The tutorial is pretty old(Sep 2008) and it mentions

Add four Hostnames for the naked domain (i.e., yourdomain.com without the www) and have them point to IP addresses 216.239.32.21, 216.239.34.21, 216.239.36.21, and 216.239.38.21.

I added the required A names to my domain dns, but accessing app.com leads me to a Google 404 page

I have used naked to www redirection on blogger using a similar method(A names provided by Google Blogger Help) and it has worked for me(it still works). However apart from the article at aralbalkan.com, I have not come across an official source which says that naked to www domain redirection using these IPs works for domains on Google Apps(which GAE uses to manage custom domains).

My Question:

Does anybody use a similar method(A names pointing to Google IPs) to resolve www domains from naked domains for custom domains on GAE? If yes, are the IPs different or am I doing it wrong?

The alternate method that I can think of using is, getting a third party host and pointing the A name of app.com to the IP address of that third party host, followed by placing a 301 redirect script to www.app.com on that host.But that will require me to manage another hosting just for naked to www redirection.

If anyone knows of any easier methods to achieve naked to www redirection on custom domains for GAE, please help.

Update:
Thank you for the answers. If it can be of any help, I am using geoscaling.com for DNS. I have an everydns account too. The domain is on namecheap and namecheap offers a freedns option too.

Update 2

Switched back my dns to namecheap. I guess geoscaling.com does not offer a 301 url redirect(correct me if I am wrong), although it's still a great service. Namecheap offers a 301 URL redirect. Should start working in some time.

Answer 1

While it's true Google doesn't officially support naked domains, it is possible to make this work using your registrar's DNS and Domain Forwarding tools.

For example, http://conversionsupport.com is hosted on Google App Engine, and GoDaddy is where the DNS is managed. The naked domain redirects to the http://www.conversionsupport.com subdomain using a domain forwarding rule.

Requests for the naked domain result in a 301 redirect to the www subdomain. Some SEO resources claim that using one subdomain is better for ensuring search engines don't see your site's content as being duplicative. This 301 redirect should help ensure that both naked domain and www subdomain are treated the same.

Here is a resource for Setting up URL Forwarding in GoDaddy. Note that while this is intended for Google Sites, I have confirmed that it does work on Google App Engine apps.

UPDATE:

To clarify, the naked domain itself will redirect to the www subdomain. This means that if your users type http://example.com then they'll be redirected to http://www.example.com as is the case with my original example above.

From what I understand, most Google Apps accounts are partnered with GoDaddy. Here are the Instructions from GoDaddy Support on Domain Forwarding Using a 301 Redirect..