: Why is Google not listing my site using its preferred domain? Using Google Webmaster tools my site is set to 'Display URLs as www.mydomain.com' as opposed 'mydomain.com'. This is the setting

@Megan663

IMO, Google will show the preferred domain in the results if it determines that mydomain.com/foo is same as www.mydomain.com/foo. Google crawls both version of your website. So, if it has crawled mydomain.com/bar but not www.mydomain.com/bar, it might show mydomain.com/bar until the time it concludes that both pages are same.

Nevertheless, this will still confuse other search engines that do not let you set a preferred domain. Best cross-search-engine solution is to implement a 301 Permanent Redirect for your website that tells browsers and bots the correct location of a page. With 301 Redirect, the bot will not index the wrong version of the page, and, in case of Google, the page rank is carried over to the redirected page.

I've explained how to setup 301 redirects on my blog (it's a relatively long article covering multiple platforms).

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@Kevin317

Even though you set a preference, Google still doesn't truly know which one you prefer if there's no domain.com --> domain.com rewrite or 301 redirect. Backlinks that point to domain.com rather than domain.com will also confuse Googlebot as your non-www domain still looks relevant.

The easiest method would be to add some logic to your root .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomainname.com$
RewriteRule (.*) www.yourdomainname.com [R=301]


From the related Google Webmaster help page:


Note: Once you've set your preferred
domain, you may want to use a 301
redirect to redirect traffic from your
non-preferred domain, so that other
search engines and visitors know which
version you prefer.

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