Https & www

[Hughescov]

Hi,

I've looked all over for this, maybe I am searching for the wrong thing but here is my question.

My site is https://mysite.com yet I want it to display as www.mysite.com in the SERP. Is this possible? I realise people like secure but I would rather display it as www because I believe people are going to skip over a result (sometimes) if it they are not sure what the https is.

My SSL certificate is for mysite.com, would my issue be resolved if I bought it for www.mysite.com instead?

Thanks in advance!

[SanketPatel]

Hi,

You should display mysite.com instead of www.mysite.com. It is possible to display your site in SERP with WWW Go in webmaster select preferred domain which you want to display. But make sure you have to set .htaccess file in you FTP and set domain which you want to open when people search your site.

[Hughescov]

Hi Sanket,

Thanks for your reply. If I change my webmaster tools settings to a preferred domain of www, this is like a rel=canonical?

I don't think I quite got the answer I'm looking for.

Basically I want to display mysite which is https://mysite.com as www.mysite.com in the SERP. I need to keep the site as https://mysite.com though as the certificate I have is for that and not WWW

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Shaun, you can't do that.

www.mysite.com is potentially different to mysite.com (whatever the protocol).

If you want the results to show the www. version this has to be the main version of the site so Sanket's answer is perfectly right.

• make the site resolve on www.
• do whatever you need to do with your cert
• set the preferred domain in webmaster tools.

OR

Make do with the non www domain.

Cheers

Marcus

[Hughescov]

Marcus,

Ok, I think my confusion started when google displayed google as www but then it redirected to https. I've recently found out this happens when your logged in to google so that explains that.

One last question, if I change my certificate to WWW will my SERP show this or will it still say https://www.mysite.com. If I want to get rid of https from showing will that mean I have to take the certificate from the homepage and just have it on the relevant pages of my website?

[SanketPatel]

Hi, Shaun,

rel=canonical is used when you have multiple pages with same product pages so you can set it for avoiding error of duplicate title and content, but if you do 301 redirect in.htaccess then your site is open with the URL which you want,  and  Google webmaster preferred setting is used for showing domain in SERP with or without WWW.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

If your site resolves to https, then it's likely Google will display it that way. I haven't seen any click-through studies of https vs non, so it's hard to say how having the https will effect you. That said, I have seen correlation studies that say shorter domain names are better correlated with higher rankings, so you may be onto something.

If I want to get rid of https from showing will that mean I have to take the certificate from the homepage and just have it on the relevant pages of my website?

Yes, if you remove the https from the homepage then Google won't display it.

Fairly certain rel=canonical is not what you're looking for here, as even if you point it to http I suspect Google will likely ignore it.

Hope this helps!