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You are correct, I am talking about in Webmaster tools. We have registered both URLs so we are good there.

I am a little confused on the picking of URL as far as mobile/social goes. Are you saying that if we linked to the www version on Twitter and set our preferred domain as non-www that it will mess up the link? Won't he 301 redirect handle that?

I agree with focusing on conversions of existing traffic during our busy period. We will implement the change after the holidays. Thank you for the good advice.

Cale

I have taken on the task of getting a fairly huge eCommerce site more SEO friendly & have just realized that no URL has been chosen as our preferred domain. Should we designate a preferred domain now or wait until after the first of the year since we are hitting our busy period right now?

Good points. With the limited knowledge of SEO and ecommerce, I really do not think it's a good idea. I personally think that we just need to concentrate more on the site we do have and polish it up. Thank you for the response.

I help organize an ecommerce site for a company that is named after the state that the company was founded in (ex: Florida Pipes). Our programmer is thinking about creating a duplicate site that would have a name that was more location agnostic so people shopping on the site would not think that they may be ordering from far away hence incurring extra shipping charges. He said that the site would only have a different URLs, name and homepage but would link to all of the same stuff that is on the site that is up now. He said that there would be no way to tell (possibly for the layperson) that the two sites were related. Is this a good practice? Would we be penalized in search results for having two URLs linking to the same content? (We are a 30 year old company that ranks very high for our main keyword)

Thank you for your input!