Webmaster tools help

The preferred domain is the one that you would liked used to index your site's pages (sometimes this is referred to as the canonical domain). Links may point to your site using both the www and non-www versions of the URL (for instance, http://www.example.com and http://example.com). The preferred domain is the version that you want used for your site in the search results.


If you see a message that your site is not indexed, it may be because it is indexed under a different domain. For example, if you receive a message that http://example.com is not indexed, make sure that you've also added http://www.example.com to your account (or vice versa), and check the data for that site.
Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, 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 follow that link as http://www.example.com instead. In addition, we'll take your preference into account when displaying the URLs. If you don't specify a preferred domain, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages.


It may take some time before you see this change fully reflected in our index. All pages that currently display the non-preferred version of the URL in the index will remain in the index that way until we refresh our indexing of those pages.

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