few days ago I created a new website and currently all my links are indexed in google as without www part (http://mysite.com).. I want to show my url as http://www.mysite.com today I added my website to google webmasters tool and set my preferred domain as http://www.mysite.com do I still need to 301 redirect http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com ??? (I didnt create any backlinks yet)
Hi Shaun_ru_th, Hey First of all u need to check that you website is opening with www or non-www. Make sure that your website is open with www[.]mysite[.]com only because if your website is open with www and non-www then there is chance of duplications and to avoid these you need to do permanent redirect means 301 from non-www to www.
If your site opens with both www and non www and you want to use the www, then setup a 301 redirect from non www to www.
Yes, You should do this. Moreover you can place this code in between head tag of your site... <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/"/>
Google preferred domain help to convince Google that both www site and non-www version are same. So you will not have any duplicate content issue. You may need to use 301 redirect to redirect users from non-www version to www version. But for Google SEO you don’t need to do 301 redirect for your case.
Simply you could avoid www and none www duplicates with a proper redirection, wordpress handles this automatically.
1) If your site is new then do not bother. 2) Set your preferred site as www. in Webmasters. 3) It is recommended to have a 301 redirect present.