: How to set www as the preferred domain for a HTTPS website? I have a website which has URL of kind https://www.example.com (Please notice HTTPS and www). It is the only correct URL of the

@Radia820

If you look into the Site Configuration section of Google webmaster tools and click on Settings you can choose how your domain appears in search results.



Regarding the error message 'Restricted to root level domains only' Google's Johnathan Mueller appears to concede that it's a bug in this thread on the Google product forum (2010) but there doesn't appear to be word on a fix.

Check that your domains are still verified as this may be the source of the error, outside of that there doesn't appear to be much you can do to solve the problem with webmaster tools.

As an alternative you could implement code like this:-

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ www.mydomain.com/ [R=301,L]


In your .htaccess file. This forces any visitor to your site to use only one version of the url, essentially this says 'if the domain is NOT mydomain.com, then redirect to mydomain.com'.

Then try implementing the the canonical microformat (if you can) to let Google know which your preferred url for the content is.

Thing is the old urls will still remain visible in the search engine unless you manually remove them, but with the htaccess code any visitors, including bots, will end up in the right place going forward.

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