Update on the Preferred Domain Option in Webmaster Central (Google Sitemap) (www or non-www, You can choose now), according to the user feedback they’d received. Previously when we choose a preferred domain (www or the non-www one), Google automatically adds the non-preferred one to your account; this caused some confusion among the webmasters.
So they have made some changes as follows:
- When you set the preferred domain, Google no longer will add the non-preferred version to your account.
- If you had previously added the non-preferred version to your account, you’ll still see it listed there, but you won’t be able to add a Sitemap for the non-preferred version.
- If you have already set the preferred domain and Google Sitemap team had added the non-preferred version to your account, they’ll be removing that non-preferred version from your account over the next few days.
A Word from the Author:
The changes you made may take some time to get visible in the results and that’s according to many other factors like – how often GBot visits your site, how many pages are being indexed with the non-preferred version etc. According to the Webmastercentral Team, it can be in Weeks. If you are already using a 301 for the preferred domain from the non-preferred one then, you don’t need this logically, but according to the Google sitemap team, this will be helpful to them to easily consolidate links to your site and over time, they’ll direct our crawl to the preferred version of your pages.
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