Hello, I have been creating websites for a long long time, but just recently started looking into the Google Webmasters tool, despite how simple Google try to make these things, then i'm a little bit confused as to how their system works, and i was hoping someone here could shed some light on the situation. I run a bunch of websites, all of these website run on the www. sub-domain. The main domain redirects directly to www. and it is impossible to visit http://example.com without getting to http://www.example.com My point, do i then need to add both sites to Google to get correct results? As i understand the Google guidelines then it's really only necessary when your using both domains, ergo, you could physically visit example.com and www.example.com without redirects. But then, i also read that adding both sites are beneficial as people might refer to your website differently around the web. Ergo, someone on Digitalpoint might refer to my website as example.com while on a different forum they refer to it as www.example.com, if not both sites are added, then google webmaster tools will not show accurate results. Is this true? I have added the www. and main domain for most of my domains, most of the main domains says that no information is found, and plenty of the www. domains have references to links around the web that does not include the www. in the domain, despite Google stating that you need both to fetch results. In advance, thank you for your educated, professional and experienced answer regarding my question.
If you make redirect is not necessary to add both sites.Our network have a lot of website in Google Webmasters with redirect.
Google does recommend adding both. You'll also notice inside Webmaster Tools you get the option to set your "preferred" version, either with-www or without-www. By adding both into Webmaster Tools and then setting your "preferred" version, it tells Google what to use in search results and might also help it some authority-wise as well!
It really depends on your goals: If you have a redirect in place, I assume that all you want is to see links that may be pointing to a non-preferred version of your site. In this case you should have both versions added. At the same time there's a number of tools that you could use to check how many links are pointing at your www. and non www. versions without waiting a while for GWT to refresh (it does take a bit of time). In the years of Google being sneaky about the way they do things, webmasters have learnt that if Google says "it is beneficial" then it should probably be done. It may affect many things and even ranking (don't confuse "may" and "will") if you follow Google's recommendations. If you don't have a redirect in place and a person can physically visit both versions of the site then youll find your content being duplicated and your rankings possibly hurt. Somehow, Google with all it's advance technology seem to have overlooked the basic concept of www and non-www sites being the same. (Would love for someone more experienced to comment on it) Pretty much if you don't feel physically ill from having your sites listed in GWT, then you should do it and not try to dig into it. Very few people will be able to say why it is so and those who can - probably will keep it a secret. You don't have to, but if by any chance it benefits your site, you will have a disadvantage in comparison to others which could have been easily avoided.