Ok. I'm going to try to explain this as clearly as possible given the fact that I am not a web developer (though I wish I were). Our current site is located at http://entrustcashadvance.com . We decided a while back to lose the www's for reasons I don't quite understand - but I have spent so much time linkbuilding without the www's that I think it's far too late to switch back. Anyway - we do approach all of our internal and external links as not having "www." www.entrustcashadvance.com is redirected to its non-www form via a 301 redirect. We want to tell google that the preferred URL structure for our site is the setup without the www. But google says, in order for us to do that, we have to verify that we own www.entrustcashadvance.com. We do - but again, that URL is being redirected. So how could I access that single www. page for verification purposes? Hope somebody can help. Thanks!
Why not just remove the redirect until you verify it, which I think is instant? I could be wrong though...but it should only have to verify once after all.
You shouldn't even have to remove the redirection. When you log into Google Webmasters to verify the www version of the domain, it will give you the option of downloading a verification file to your Web server. If you store that file, you should be able to accomplish the verification without ever changing anything. Obviously, when the crawler hits your server, it will follow the redirection... but it will still find the file it's looking for, and you should be good to go
If you have the htaccess 301 redirect working so that you cannot access www version of your site, then there is not need to tell google that you want them to use the non www version. By performing the redirect, google knows you want them to use the non www version of your site. You are performing redundant procedures.
just go through the verification process. www or non-www won't matter for verification. you will be able to access the verification file anyways, so will google
I don't understand why do you need to verify or think so much deeper for this issue. Just use 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. What you need to do is to redirect your www.domain.com to domain.com with 301 redirect. Everything else will be automatically taken care of. Search engine is bound to index you url as a non www domain if you use 301 redirect with .htaccess
The whole reason I'm trying to go through this whole process is because I've been told that Google counts "www.entrustcashadvance.com" and "http://entrustcashadvance.com" as different links. Like if you type site:www.entrustcashadvance.com and site:http://entrustcashadvance.com into Google, you get two different numbers of results.
You guys were right - I just needed to add the www. site to webmaster tools and since the verification file was already uploaded, it redirected it to our actual site and it worked. Thanks!!