Usually any site which is not using redirection from www to non www or vice-versa is creating a duplicate cope of his own site. Google offers various ways by which you can tell Google to tell which site to index. Usually web masters set 301 redirection or use canonicalization to set their preferred domain. Here I’m sharing one more way by which you can tell Google which is your preferred domain. Usually you don’t have to worry much about this setting if you are using WordPress, but again it’s always a good idea to configure this setting from Google Webmaster tool.
If you not sure you are making same mistake by offering two different links for the same content, try to open your site with and without www. If both of them redirects to one URL, you need not need to worry about, else you should make sure that both the URL should redirected to one URL only.
What is Preferred domain setting?
As name suggests, you can tell Google which URL ( www or Non www) you would like Google to index. Though this
You can treat your domain like http://nagaruntari.in or http://www.nagaruntari.in. If you don’t set your preferred domain style, chances of getting penalize for duplication of content by Google is very high.
This is what Google talk about preferred domain :
The preferred domain is the one that you would like used to index your site’s pages. If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com , we’ll treat that link as if it was http://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 can read more about preferred domain here on Google official page.
To configure this setting, you need to verify domain ownership of your domain with www and without www. You can use the same meta verification to verify your ownership or upload the verification file offered by Google Webmaster tool, when you submit your website. Once you have verified the ownership, login to your website dashboard under Google webmaster tool and click on gear icon on the right and click on site settings.
You can read more about preferred domain here on Google official page.
How you can set up your preferred domain using Google webmaster tool?
To configure this setting, you need to verify domain ownership of your domain with www and without www. You can use the same meta verification to verify your ownership or upload the verification file offered by Google Webmaster tool, when you submit your website. Once you have verified the ownership, login to your website dashboard under Google webmaster tool and click on gear icon on the right and click on site settings.
From there you can set your preferred domain settings. As I mentioned above, you need to add www and non www version of your domain.
Though if you have set proper 301 redirection, which usually any WordPress blog does by default, you can skip this step. Once you are configuring Webmaster tool for your blog, you might like to set it too.
