Any harm and why the differences - multiple versions of same site in WMT

[zingseo]

In Google Webmaster Tools we have set up:

ourdomain.co.nz
ourdomain.co.uk
ourdomain.com
ourdomain.com.au
www.ourdomain.co.nz
www.ourdomain.co.uk
www.ourdomain.com
www.ourdomain.com.au
https://www.ourdomain.co.nz
https://www.ourdomain.co.uk
https://www.ourdomain.com
https://www.ourdomain.com.au

As you can imagine, this gets confusing and hard to manage. We are wondering whether having all these domains set up in WMT could be doing any damage? Here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44231 it says:

"If you see a message that your site is not indexed, it may be because it is indexed under a different domain. For example, if you receive a message that http://example.com is not indexed, make sure that you've also added http://www.example.com to your account (or vice versa), and check the data for that site."

The above quote suggests that there is no harm in having several versions of a site set up in WMT, however the article then goes on to say:

"Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead."

This suggests that having multiple versions of the site loaded in WMT may cause Google to continue crawling multiple versions instead of only crawling the desired versions (https://www.ourdomain.com + .co.nz, .co.uk, .com.au).

However, even if Google does crawl any URLs on the non https versions of the site (ie ourdomain.com or www.ourdomain.com), these 301 to https://www.ourdomain.com anyway... so shouldn't that mean that google effectively can not crawl any non https://www versions (if it tries to they redirect)? If that was the case, you'd expect that the ourdomain.com and www.ourdomain.com versions would show no pages indexed in WMT, however the oposite is true. The ourdomain.com and www.ourdomain.com versions have plenty of pages indexed but the https versions have no data under Index Status section of WMT, but rather have this message instead:

Data for https://www.ourdomain.com/ is not available. Please try a site with http:// protocol: http://www.ourdomain.com/.

This is a problem as it means that we can't delete these profiles from our WMT account.

Any thoughts on the above would be welcome.

As an aside, it seems like WMT is picking up on the 301 redirects from all ourdomain.com or www.ourdomain.com domains at least with links - No ourdomain.com or www.ourdomain.com URLs are registering any links in WMT, suggesting that Google is seeing all links pointing to URLs on these domains as 301ing to https://www.ourdomain.com ... which is good, but again  means we now can't delete https://www.ourdomain.com either, so we are stuck with 12 profiles in WMT... what a pain....

Thanks for taking the time to read the above, quite complicated, sorry!! Would love any thoughts...

[Everett]

I agree with Federico that you probably don't need to have every page be secure. Perhaps you should consider making the http://www. version your canonical default instead?

[Everett]

It is fine to have multiple versions of a site in different countries. Some of the biggest brands in the world do this. There are "right" and "wrong" ways to go about it, but if I had a ccTLD for the UK and lots of UK customers I wouldn't send them to my US site, regardless of whether I had a /uk/ folder or not.

[FedeEinhorn]

Chirs,

Is the content exactly the same on all domains? Anything changes between .com, .co.uk, etc?

If so, you MUST use the canonical to only ONE version (.com would be my guess) and rel="alternate" for the other domains, however, that doesn't make any sense if the content is the same. Why not just redirect all domains to .com (or whatever definitive version you choose)?

[zingseo]

Hi Frederico,

Thanks very much for your response. And yes, sorry, my initial question wasn't written so great, sorry!

ourdomain.com and www.ourdomain.com both 301 to https://www.ourdomain.com (which is also the canonical definitive version for the .com)

ourdomain.co.uk and www.ourdomain.co.uk both 301 to https://www.ourdomain.co.uk (which is also the canonical definitive version for the .co.uk)

and the same as above for .com.au domains, and .co.nz domains.

The content is the same across all domains.

The thing is that a lot of info appears in Webmaster tools under the non canonical versions of the sites, and is not showing under the canonical profile in WMT. Which makes us feel like maybe we shouldn't delete those profiles?

Regarding the HTTP vs HTTPS issues... sounds like what you are saying is that we should consider only using HTTPS on pages that really need it - at the moment it is site wide. That makes sense.

Thanks again and look forward to your thoughts as to whether there is any benefit or harm if we keep/remove the non canonical site profiles from WMT.

[FedeEinhorn]

Hi Chris,

That was hard to follow. Let's start with the basics:

Do all those domains redirect to one single domain? or all those domains serve the same content but within the domain accessed?

If you redirect all domains to a single domain, using a 301 will do while having the profiles in WMT is useless. If you serve the same content within all domains, you should use canonicals pointing to a definitive version with no canonical tag. Then again, you can use WMT to track searches and links, but Google will serve one URL in their results, and that's the one all other versions are pointing in the canonical tag.

Now, are you trying to serve all your content under SSL or standard HTTP? As that causes a duplicate content issue if you are serving both, and again, you should use 301 to the verison you prefer or canonicals. There's no benefit or harm using HTTPS for all your pages, and sometimes, HTTPS could be slower as the browser has to negotiate certificates in each request (I would go with regular HTTP if you are not requesting input from your visitors or showing private information).

Am I on the right track so far?