: Why do I need multiple sites for the same property in Google Webmaster Tools? In researching the best practice for adding sites to the Search Console, I've often seen it suggested to add separate
In researching the best practice for adding sites to the Search Console, I've often seen it suggested to add separate properties for different versions of the same website. Even in Google's own documentation it states:
"Similarly, if your site has and versions, you should
add each as a separate site."
I've seen the same suggested for www/non-www. So if a site is accessible at all the variations of http/s and www/non-www we should have four properties.
But what if the site is only accessible at one variant? i.e. https and www are forced via htaccess, so only www.example.com can ever be accessed - should we still add all the variants?
In essence, the problem is that I don't know why Google wants us to do this, so I can't work out if it'll be ok just to have one instance.
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The only time I would see a real benefit in adding any variants to a domain for GWT (a.k.a. Google Webmaster Tools) is if there is unique data as a result from accessing that domain, or if that domain was active in the past and changes were recently made.
If you're just building a site at let's say example.com and you never published any content at example.com or www.example.com or the like, then I'd only have example.com listed in GWT and the rest of the variants not listed.
If you decided to rename the official domain of the site, say from example.com to www.example.com then keep both versions live in GWT and watch the crawling stats as well as the indexing to make sure www.example.com has the traffic. Once example.com in GWT reports no traffic or very little traffic, then you can safely remove it and leave www.example.com in.
Also, make sure you visit site settings for both domains and maximize the crawl rate for googlebot to make the job go faster.
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