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Bye Bye Preferred Domain setting
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
As we progress with
the migration
to the new Search Console experience, we will be saying farewell to one of our settings: preferred
domain.
It's common for a website to have the same content on multiple URLs. For example, it might have
the same content on https://example.com/ as on
https://www.example.com/index.html. To make things easier, when our
systems recognize that, we'll pick one URL as the "canonical" for Search. You can still tell us
your preference in multiple ways if there's something specific you want us to pick (see
paragraph below). But if you don't have a preference, we'll choose the best option we find. Note
that with the deprecation we will no longer use any existing Search Console preferred domain
configuration.
You can find detailed explanations on how to tell us your preference in the
Consolidate duplicate URLs
help center article. Here are some of the options available to you:
-
Use
rel="canonical" link tag on HTML pages
-
Use
rel="canonical" HTTP header
-
Use a sitemap
-
Use
301 redirects for retired URLs
Send us any feedback either through
Twitter or
our forum.
Posted by
Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate
Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
[null,null,[],[[["Google Search Console is retiring the preferred domain setting as part of its migration to a new experience."],["Google will automatically select a canonical URL for websites with duplicate content on multiple URLs, but webmasters can still indicate their preference using methods like rel=\"canonical\", sitemaps, or 301 redirects."],["Existing preferred domain configurations in Search Console will no longer be used after this change."],["Detailed information about managing canonical URLs can be found in the \"Consolidate duplicate URLs\" help center article."],["Feedback on this change is welcomed through Twitter or the Google Search Console forum."]]],["The \"preferred domain\" setting in the Search Console is being removed. Websites with duplicate content on multiple URLs will have one URL chosen as the \"canonical\" for search. Users can still indicate their preferred URL using `rel=\"canonical\"` link tags or HTTP headers, sitemaps, or `301` redirects. If no preference is indicated, the system will automatically select the best option. The change means any current preferred domain configurations will be ignored. Feedback can be submitted through Twitter or the forum.\n"]]
