Hi All, While selecting preferred domain's 2nd option (display URLs as www.) Don't set a preferred domain Display URLs as www.sitename Display URLs as sitename I am getting below msg, can anyone please help me out to complete it? "Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://Sitename/. Please verify http://sitename/." how can I verify - http://sitename/ ? Thanks
Please make it clear to us. From where did you get that message? What did you do to have gotten such message?
I am guessing that for your site you are already verified as the Webmaster for www.yoursite.com (replace yoursite.com with your real domain and TLD). All they are saying is that you must also verify yourself in Webmaster Tools for the non-www version (yoursite.com) of your domain before being allowed to do this. As long as the DNS for www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com both point to the same code base in the same web root (i.e. execute out of the same root folder) then all you have to do is: 1) log into webmaster tools 2) on your WMT home page that lists all the sites that you are verified for, click the ADD SITE button at the top and enter yoursite.com - the non-www version of your website domain name. 3) when you are thrown back to the home page again yoursite.com (the non-www version) should now show with a VERIFY THIS SITE link to the right. Click on that link and select the same method (meta verification or file verification) that you used to originally verify the www.yoursite.com domain. It should verify immediately. Life is good. Once you're verified as the webmaster for BOTH www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com THEN you should be able to set the prefered domain.
Just open the Webmaster Tools homepage and follow the steps as described, that's fairly simple as soon as you see the actual page.
When you first log into Webmaster Tools, the page that comes up is your WMT Home Page. It displays all of the sites for which you have been verified as the webmaster. It also has an ADD SITE button at the top to all you to verify other sites.
As far as I was concerned, I simply proceeded as follows: 1. I had my site with www verified. 2. Then I went to the "setting" part of google webmaster of the site 3. I ticked my preferred option I did not have to add and verify my site both with and without www. In fact Google writes about these matters: To specify your preferred domain: On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want. Under Site configuration, click Settings. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want. You may need to reverify ownership of your sites. Because setting a preferred domain impacts both crawling and indexing, we need to ensure that you own both versions. Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case. Generally, once you have verified one version of the domain, we can easily verify the other by finding the verification HTML file or meta tag. However, if you've removed the file or meta tag, you'll need to repeat the verification steps. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44231 BTW Don't forget to redirect the non preferred domain to the preferred domain (redirection 301) .
Hmmm Jose... Maybe you already had them both verified. It wouldn't let the OP set the preferred domain until he verified both. Even the text you quoted from Google says that you have to verify both the www and non-www version of the site before you're allowed to change the setting. Note the sentences in bold that you quoted: