How to make sure that Search Engines index my website with WWW only! NOT WITHOUT WWW

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by cri8bat, Nov 23, 2012.

  1. #1
    Hi,

    what to do to make sure that my website is always indexed with www.domain.extension and not without www

    I have created a .htaccess file for a 301 redirect but still that didnt done the job, I can see that my website is rank without www and with www

    how to make sure that link juice is not divided???
     
    cri8bat, Nov 23, 2012 IP
  2. ryan_uk

    ryan_uk Illustrious Member

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    #2
    301 is part of what you need to do (I assume you confirmed the redirect worked and allowed time for Google to catch up, too), but you also need to set the preferred domain to www.domain.tld in Google Webmaster Tools. To do this, you will need to add both www.domain.tld and domain.tld to Google Webmaster Tools. Next go into Configuration > Settings and choose your preferred domain. After you've saved it, you can deleted domain.tld from Google Webmaster Tools.

    Don't worry, due to the 301 you're barely losing link juice (a minuscule amount).
     
    ryan_uk, Nov 23, 2012 IP
  3. cri8bat

    cri8bat Well-Known Member

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    #3
    I just done what you told me :)
    now waiting to google update it search results....
    thank you
     
    cri8bat, Nov 23, 2012 IP
    ryan_uk likes this.
  4. sanjayyadav

    sanjayyadav Greenhorn

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    #4
    Use canonical tag to get index with www.
     
    sanjayyadav, Nov 23, 2012 IP
  5. ryan_uk

    ryan_uk Illustrious Member

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    #5
    For this scenario, rel="canonical" wouldn't be appropriate. There's a loss of juice and it's not a duplicate content issue.

    rel="canonical" is more used when there are pages with the same (or very similar) content. For example, you might have:

    and it gives a list of the different widgets, but you want to sort them by colour:

    The content is essentially the same, so you would have:

    <link rel="canonical" href="http://domain.com/widgets.php" />
    HTML:
    So you wouldn't end up with the same page multiple times (or even domain.com/widgets.php?sort=colour as the indexed page instead).
     
    ryan_uk, Nov 23, 2012 IP