Unable to set preferred domain, can I verify a site that's already redirected?
-
I'm in the process of trying to set a preferred domain in webmaster tools -- to set our www version as preferred vs. the non www. version. IT is already redirecting non-www to www, but I get this message when trying to change settings "Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://mnn.com/. Please verify http://mnn.com/."
While we own the domain, I am not sure how we can have Google access a file at [http://mnn.com/some_file when we are forwarding all requests for non-www to our www site.
Note: The apache rewrite predates me and I'm not sure how / why we have two domains set up, but I'm trying to fix the preferred domain now.Am I able to verify the non version once the redirect is in place.Any ideas??? Help???Thanks!Lisa -
Glad you got it taken care of, Aggie.
Now that you've got your answer, could you mark as "Good Answer" whichever answers you found most helpful and mark the overall question as answered? This will help other users who may come across the question in the future.
Thanks!
Paul
<object id="plugin0" style="position: absolute; z-index: 1000;" width="0" height="0" type="application/x-dgnria"><param name="tabId" value="ff-tab-26"> <param name="counter" value="217"></object>
-
Thanks, y'all! I figured it out! Yay! You guys are the best Who knew. I expect things to be SOOOO difficult with Google, this one was way to simple.
Cheers!
Aggie
-
The trick here, Aggie, is that every site you verify through your Webmaster Tools account will give you the same verification file/code to upload to the website. So when you ask Webmaster Tools to create and verify a new site using the non-www version of the domain, it will find the file you uploaded the first time (since as you say - they're the same site!) and will recognize it as your WMT account verification code.
A bit counter-intuitive, but as Irving and Paul say... it just works
~ Another Paul
-
Just enter the non www as a new site and hit verify and it will be accepted, no need to add another verification file, it's the same site and will recognize and accept it.
-
Hey Lisa,
Don't worry about the redirect. Just go to webmaster tools and input the non www version of your site and go through the verification process. Use the same method to verify that you did for the WWW version and you should be able to set the preferred domain after that.
Sincerely,
Paul
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do more links from sub-domains to domain (website) hurt rankings?
Hi all, If there are multiple sub-domains like abc.website.com, 123.website.com, etc...and if the top pages of website are linked from multiple sub-domains via top menu or footer links; will this hurts? Will too much interlinking of few top pages of a website from it's sub-domains dilute link juice? How many links ideally we can add to website from a sub-domain? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Should I Kill the Old Domain or Work Through the Redirect?
Our IT department wasn't able to create a new directory on the current domain name for whatever reason and so we had to create a new domain name called ww2.domain.com to build the new site. So now we have the new site up and appartly some PDFs and pages are being directed to the from the old site. www.domain.com but 10,000 pages /PDFs are still indexed in Google and are not redirected. So when you open the page you get the old www.domain.com instead of it redirecting to ww2.domain.com. It's sort of a mess! My question is can we just kill the old domain name and move the ww2.domain.com back to the old domain? We also want to do away with the ww2.domain.com and go back to www.domain.com. I know it's confusing as heck! What would you recommend?
Web Design | | Eagle-ABS0 -
Footer link back to developers domain
I have read a lot about where it is suggested to either not put an attribute link in the footer of a clients site or to no follow it. But I have a little bit different take on the question. How does this work on a large scale? Are these manual penalties, or are they automatic? By large scale, I am talking about big cms programs such as Wordpress, Joomla, and the likes of those. They all have links back to their site in the footer of the default templates. Is this bad? Does it not rally matter on the scale of companies such as this?
Web Design | | LesleyPaone0 -
What's the point of an EU site?
Buongiorno from 18 degrees C Wetherby UK 🙂 On this site http://www.milwaukeetool.eu/ the client wants to hold on to the EU site despite there being multiple standalone country sittes e.g. http://www.milwaukeetool.fr & http://www.milwaukeetool.co.uk Why would you ever need an EU site? I mean who ever searches for an EU site? If the client holds on to the eu site despite my position it's a waiste of time from a search perspective is the folowing the best appeasment? When a user enters the eu url or redirects to country the detected, eg I'm in Paris I enter www.milwaukeetool.eu it redirects to http://www.milwaukeetool.fr. My felling this would be the most pragmatic thing to do? Any ideas please,
Web Design | | Nightwing
Cioa,
David0 -
Redirecting duplicate pages
For whatever reason, X-cart creates duplicates of our categories and articles so that we have URLs like this www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars
Web Design | | k9byron
www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/ or http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar
http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar/ now our SEO guy says that we dont have to redirect these because google is "smart enough" to know they are the same, and that we should "leave it as-is". However, everything I have read online says that google sees this as dupe content and that we should redirect to one or the other / or no /, depending on which most of our internal links already point to, which is with a slash. What should we do? Redirect or leave it as is? Thanks!0 -
Can anyone recommend a firm for cross-browser testing?
I'd like to outsource the cross-browser testing and get complete functionality testing across browsers too. I work for an online travel tour operator, so we take a lot of reservations online. I don't totally trust my internal resources using tools like Selenium because we're adding a lot of new functionality to our new site - saved itineraries, wish list, some upselling and cross selling functionality, selling insurance, etc. So, while of course I want to be sure everything renders properly across browsers, I also feel like the investment in having someone check booking process in all browsers/technologies is critical especially since many of our customers are accessing our sites using older browsers. Thoughts??
Web Design | | CityWonders0 -
Site Re-Design - Running old XML site map for 301's
Hi all, We are going to launch a new site design for our current e-commerce site. I have taken this opportunity to change some categories due to keyword research and all old categories will be 301ed to best fitting new category. So I have 2 questions about moving stuff over; 1. I read that leaving the old xml site map running for the first week, would help, because this would give crawlers the chance to run through the site and follow the 301s, which would help pass the juice. How true does this sound? 2. I was thinking of re-writing all category and sub category titles, meta descriptions and on page content. The positive of this is loads of fresh content - but doing this all at the same time with the new site launch might see some major dropping in search ranking. I've identified our top traffic keyword terms/pages, would it be more wise to leave these pages, and change the others, or would the total new fresh burst have a better impact? Cheers
Web Design | | ToxicFox0 -
How to set up Wordpress on our Germany Host?
Correct me if I am wrong, but for SEO purposes, it is best to host your website in the correct country? I set up hosting in Germany for our new website, but now I am concerned on how to set up our wordpress website through our german host and setting up the database. Or would I be safe to host it in the US? Can I set it all up in English and then translate it to German and then upload it that way?
Web Design | | hfranz0