www or non-www, You can choose now

Hey… Good news to the webmasters….today. Google Sitemap team added a new option to your Sitemap, using which you can tell to Google that which domain you prefer to be listed – http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com.

You can see the new option under the ‘Diagnostic’ tab, Under Tools, as the last option called ‘Preferred domain‘. As you see the Screenshot below we can now specify which one to go for – whether the www. version or the non-www one.

Also as any normal options, they’d put a disclaimer at the confirmation page of your submission.

“Once you specify your preference here, it may take some time for changes to be reflected in our index. While Google doesn’t guarantee that we’ll show your URLs in the form that you prefer, we will use your choice as a suggestion to improve our indexing.”

A Word from the Author:

I hope you all aware about the issue while Google finds your www.domain.com and domain.com as two different pages. Logically this matter is not a digestable one for most of the webmasters, but technically this is a mater of concern. Most of us know how to deal such a situation by putting a 301 redirect from the non-www version to the www.domain.com one, and that works too in most of the cases. But this step from Google’s side hopefully may help lot more who is still in confusion with the mod.redirects and having IIS servers. For those who are technically not well sounded and are not having access to the cpanel to alter the server side settings, hopefully this move from the Google may help a lot.

We all know this is an issue which made loads in confusion and a nightmare to thousand of webmasters. Now hopefully Google is trying to address it in the right way.