1 reply to this topic

[lister]

Hi in google webmaster settings you can allocate your preferred domain to display URLs as www.my-domain.com or display URLs as my-domain.com

Thing is I am not sure which one I have or rahter which one is the "default" and does it matter? Both load just as fast. I wouldnt want to miss out on 301 re-directs and not have one of the versions indexded.

Also, how do you actually manipulate that - is it by using 301?

Thanks

[qwerty]

301 is my preferred method. If I set everything to redirect to one version, Google won't see the other version, so they won't index it and I won't have to worry about it.

I'm not sure how long ago Google added this extra step in Webmaster Tools. It used to be that you could tell them which version you preferred and that would be the end of it, although of course I'd still set up the redirects -- bit in WMT was just a simple something extra. But some time ago, they added that, even after you've verified a domain, if you wanted to tell Google via WMT that you had a preference between www or not, you had to verify the other version too. I've done that once, and that extra listing just sits there in my list of domains for no reason.