Htaccess Question - Is this the way to go to consolidate?

[VMLQais]

Hi all,

My site seems to have www.xyz.com, http://www.xyz.com, http://xyz.com and other variations! From an old agency doing this. All showing differing backlinks etc. SO I want to merge them so I can just look at one analytics account - with everything combined.

I want it just to consolidate all to https:///www.xym.com as the client wants - how do I do this? Does it take long to take effect??

Also I presume in webmaster I'll have to set up the preferred extension?

Thanks very much for any advice

[donford]

We can help you get all those urls to point to the https on the server. But what reports are you referring to?

[VMLQais]

It's actually just by looking at link reports to the variations that I can see they fluctuate with differing versions. So I'm looking for a simple way to make sure all the prefixes redirect to https://. Thanks for the comments so far.

[RyanPurkey]

Excellent addition. Probably a combination of both since he states that the client wants to migrate to HTTPS. We'll have to get clarification from Giles.

[donford]

Ryan,
I was going to mention this but after I re-read it. It seems he is dealing with an issue inside Google Webmaster Central that shows reports for more then one domain. I have seen this before where they list domains like

http://www.site.com
http://www.site.com/shop
http://www.site.com/

Each showing different metrics.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Giles. You'll end up with something similar to this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]

RewriteRule ^page1(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/page1$1 [R,L]

The first being an example of redirecting an entire domain to HTTPS and the second, a specific page.

The effects of the redirection are immediate in the sense that once the .htaccess file is changed the redirection will be in place. What takes a longer amount of time is for the change to carry over in Google's ranking and throughout the web. Using the tools in GWT and Bing can help.

Here are a couple of guides that you might find useful: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos and http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection.