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:

1. Use rel="canonical" link tag on HTML pages
2. Use rel="canonical" HTTP header
3. Use a sitemap
4. Use 301 redirects for retired URLs

Send us any feedback either through
Twitter or
our forum.

Posted by
Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate