: How to stop Google indexing both www. and no-www versions of my website When I do a search of my site in Google it shows both: mydomain.com www.mydomain.com In my .htaccess file I added

@Angela700

In addition to Evgeny's very good points, it should be noted that the Google Webmaster's tool allows you to specify a preferred domain, either with or without the www prefixes. Google's explanation of this option follows:


The preferred domain is the one that
you would like used to index your
site's pages. If you specify your
preferred domain as
www.example.com and we find a
link to your site that is formatted as
example.com , we'll treat that
link as if it was
www.example.com . In addition,
we'll take your preference into
account when displaying URLs in our
search results. It may take some time
for changes to be reflected in our
index.


You'll find the option under "Site ConfigurationsSettings".

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@Sent6035632

A little bit of an aside, but why do you still want to use the www domain? It's no longer necessary and adds more bloat to your url. Check out the no-www project for more info.
no-www.org/
As to your problem, give Google sometime to reindex your site and be happy that your site is still showing up twice in the results.

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@Caterina187

First, I hope you put a proper 301 redirect for any page in your htaccess.

If some of your pages require parameters, like example.com/?p=20, then you need to use mod_rewrite with [R=301] instead of the easier mod_alias Redirect directive in your htaccess. Also, until Google Bot comes again and indexes, it will not update the Google index.

Second, it will take some time for Google to reindex your website. You can try and submit a proper sitemap (sitemap.xml) to google via Google Webmaster Tools but it still might take some time.

Third, you might want to use a rel=canonical tag on your pages - especially if your redirect is not working yet to hint Google for proper indexing of your pages.

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