Apr 29 2010

Quick SEO Tip: Set Preferred Domain in Google Webmaster Tools

By Monji in Tutorials23 Comments

There are a few quick fixes you can apply to your site that can help boost your search rankings. If you haven’t already done these, take a break from what you’re doing and do this first – the results will be well worth the 10 minutes it will take.

Use Either WWW or No-WWW

Search engines treat each sub-domain, including www, as a different website altogether. This means that if your content is accessible via www and without it, both will be crawled and ranked in search engines. This will hurt your overall page rank (effectively splitting it) and reduce the number of backlinks to your domain. Be decisive – pick one or the other and configure your website to redirect traffic there.
The technique varies depending on your web server, but here are a few quick methods:

Using Apache

First, make sure you have mod_rewrite installed and enabled. Then create or modify an .htaccess file (in your directory root) and enter the following:

Redirect to WWW

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RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Redirect to No-WWW

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RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Using Lighttpd

Edit your site configuration, which is either your /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf file or virtual host file (usually in sites-available), and add:

Redirect to WWW

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$HTTP["host"] =~ "^www\.(.*)" {
    url.redirect = ( "^/(.*)" => "http://%1/$1" )
}

Redirect to No-WWW

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$HTTP["host"] =~ "^domain\.com$" {
    url.redirect = ( "^/(.*)" => "http://www.domain.com/$1" )
}

Using nginx

Edit your site configuration, which is either your /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf file or virtual host file (usually in sites-available), and add:

Redirect to WWW

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server {
    server_name  domain.com;
    rewrite ^(.*) http://www.domain.com$1 permanent;
}

server {
    server_name  www.domain.com;
    # Enter your configuration info here
}

Redirect to No-WWW

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server {
    server_name  www.domain.com;
    rewrite ^(.*) http://domain.com$1 permanent;
}

server {
    server_name  domain.com;
    # Enter your configuration info here
}

Using Windows

I personally have zero experience using Windows servers, however I did find this article by Electric Media that may help. There are also a few forum posts that may shed some light into the matter.

Set Preferred Domain

Setting Preferred Domain in Google Webmaster ToolsUsing the incredibly useful Google Webmaster Tools, you can set a preferred domain for your website that Google will favor in rankings. One useful bit of information is that you must verify both www.domain.com and domain.com to be able to select a preferred domain. This took me a little searching to figure out but it makes sense – Google does really treat different sub-domains, including www, as different websites.

You can find the Preferred Domain setting under Site Configuration -> Settings in your domain settings.

Final Words

It takes less than 10 minutes to implement www/no-www on your website and set a preferred domain – if you haven’t already done so, do it ASAP! This will help improve your search rankings and will make sure you’re not penalized for duplicate content, and the results are simply well worth the time.

If you have any other quick SEO tips or suggestions, please leave them in the comments. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter!