If you’re using the Blogger or Blogspot platform for your website, it is important to have a preferred domain name for your blog because www.yoursite.com is different to yoursite.com in the eyes of search engines. To have a uniform canonicalization and to avoid duplicate content issues, we must use and only choose one preferred domain.
Custom domain name which starts with www is often used when we start a website using Blogger. If you wish to use this domain name to all your web pages, you must also check it at Google Webmaster Tools under Configuration and Settings. Once it’s set up, even though people type your web address or URL without the www, it will still redirect to the one with www.
Redirect to Naked Domain in Blogger
If you choose to use a naked domain name (without www), you need to set it up on your Google Apps account if you bought your domain name through Blogger. I bought mine from eNom and it was directly done from Blogger. Go Daddy is also another provider. This is so simple and easy. Just follow the steps below.
- Log in to your Google Apps account.
- Go to Domain Settings tab, then to Domain Names.
- Select the Redirect your naked domain link and remove the triple Ws and save changes.
- Next, log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account. From the dashboard, select your website account and go to Configuration, then Settings. Select “Display URLs as yoursite.com”
What happens when you have a preferred domain name? It means, search engines will redirect to your chosen domain regardless people write or link to either www or non-www in the URL. It is also very good to SEO. If you want to redirect your domain to WordPress, I also made a post about it. Check it out if you are using WordPress platform and you want to verify your preferred domain in Webmaster Tools.
If you are hosting your website in a third party webhosting, there is an extra way to do it using URL rewrite. The display can stay as http://www.website.com or http://website.com or totally rewritten.
Yup I just set up the preferred one on GWT to make all things uniform. Nice tips you shared there
Thanks man for sharing this great helpful post 🙂
Pleasure dude!