Preferred domain means, How you want your domain to be treated as?
You can treat your domain like http://shoutmeloud.com or http://www.shoutmeloud.com .
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.
Because Google will treat both the links as separate link.
How you can set up your preferred domain using Google webmaster tool?
Login to Google webmaster tool.
Under settings > use Preferred domain to set your preferences. And click save.
Don’t forget to see my other SEO strategies to make your blog search engine friendly.
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
wordpress already has this option enabled,anyways nice article for those who aren’t working on wordpress platform
Nice info,i was totally unaware.
There are some great features in your webmaster tool. Like image search permission and robots.txt.
try to use them to make the most out of it.
Harsh I tried it. But after setting preferred domain it asks me to verify domain. How to do that? Try to reply ASAP
Puneet that’s the first thing you have done after putting your domain into Google webmaster tool…
There are two ways to verify Google webmaster tool..
1. meta tag
2. Upload a HTML file
You can use any of these method..
I have already added meta tag. So now the only thing I am required to do is choose the preferred domain. Or do I need to do anything else
I’m having this same problem, I verified my site
http://www.lsacoustics.com
But it wont let me change my preference because it says i havn’t verified http://lsacoustics.com
Instead you can use enforce www wordpress plugin. That will also help.
I figured it out, its because you need to add http://yoursite.com as a new site.
That’s great Pete that you figured out yourself. Feel free to ask anything, will try to answer .. This will also help me to do my research