Www, non www, 301 redirects, Google webmaster tools & SeomozPro

[SheffieldMarketing]

arg! Any help on this topic would be greatly appreciated! This is in regards to sheffieldfurniture .com  In October of 2011 I had our host set up a redirect for our site so all non www requests would be redirected to the www version and it works great (so it seems at least)

Recently I signed up for SEOMOZPRO and when I started trying to track my organic results for various keywords I realized that Google has my site indexed in the non www format.

Is this a problem? I’ve read you can tell google what your preferred domain is in Google Webmaster Tools, is that what I should be doing? Are there any negatives to doing that? I’m just confused as to why Google hasn’t noticed or acknowledged the redirect in 4 months. It makes me wonder if something isn’t working properly?

I have since added a second SEOMOZPRO campaign with the non www version but I’m worried about having historical tracking issues if I then tell google to use the www version…

[MRCSearch]

Hmm. I'm seeing the homepage indexed as non-www, however every internal page I just checked out is indexed as the www version.

I'd check your GWT indexed pages, and see if both the non-www and www home pages are indexed there, tell google to prefer the www, and go from there.

Also check your backlinks. If they're going to non-www, well...then it becomes difficult.

[SheffieldMarketing]

hmm Thats really odd, I also found out from someone that my redirect was not setup correctly...it's a 302 not a 301.

sorry whats GWT indexed pages?

And what do the backlinks matter? If I have a redirect setup shouldn't that take care of everything?

[MRCSearch]

GWT = Google Webmaster Tools. There is an option to view what pages from your site is indexed. Check there to see if you've got duplicates indexed.

Backlinks don't pass 100% of their SEO juice through a 301, just most of it (like 90%). That 10% loss can be a lot if you've got tremendous amounts of backlinks pointing to the non-preferred domain.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Nicholas,

Have you been able to straighten this out, or would you like some more assistance regarding Google Webmaster Tools?