More than one Google webmaster account

[AndrewSelectContracts]

Based on different preferred domain URLs under site settings, we have added three Google webmaster accounts for our client's website as below:

Is it a good practice? or we should have only one with one "Don't set a preferred domain"? Can you please advise what is right?

1) example.co.uk

Site settings:

Preferred domain:Display URLs as example.co.uk

2) www.example.co.uk

Site settings:

Preferred domain:Display URLs as www.example.co.uk

3) https://www.example.co.uk

Site settings:

Preferred domain:Display URLs as https://www.example.co.uk

[TicketCity]

It is my understanding that the preferred way to do this would be using your https version of the site and display as www.example.co.uk. Having three will give you triplicate data. Unless you are migrating from non-secure to secure there should be no reason to have mulitple webmaster accounts for the same site.

[Keszi]

Hi Mark,

For some projects I have also set up more than one GWT profiles, but that was only to make sure that Google does take in consideration the preferred URL version I have set.

What you are currently doing is that you give Google three different URL versions that you would prefer in search results. If you are showing the same content one these three version than I would say it is wrong to apply different versions.

But we need to clear up some stuff: http vs https protocol.

• Does your website has a site-wide https protocol? if so: why do you need to register the http protocol website in GWT?

If you are running on an apache server, you can force people/bots to visit only the https version. You can do this by creating a redirect rule from .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R,L]

• Does your website has only for a particular folder on which it uses https?

Then you can simply create a rule that redirects that specific folder: somefolder in this example

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} somefolder
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.domain.com/somefolder/$1 [R,L]

If you are using a sitewide HTTPS protocol, then I would go with only one GWT profile for https://www.example.com (and I would make sure that all traffic is redirected to the https://www version)

If you are not using sitewide HTTPS protocol, I would create more profiles:

1. One for https version
2. One for the http version

www versus non-www version.

Now we have two versions here:

• If you prefer www over non-www

#Force www:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]

• If you prefer non-www over www

#Force non-www:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This way we make sure that only one version is going to be crawled and indexed by the Big G

I hope this cleared it up a little.

Greetings,

Keszi