But only if you use them…
If you have your site registered with Google’s Webmaster Tools, also known as Google Sitemaps, then there’s a handy little feature in there that can help you avoid a fairly common SEO problem. But it only works if you use it. Unlike myself who felt he was smart enough not to need it.
If you go to the “Tools” menu and select the “Set preferred domain” sub-menu item, you’ll be presented with the option to have Google treat your website as http://hostname.com, http://www.hostname.com or no preference. Since I felt that my experience would prevent me from making such an obvious mistake, I just ignored the tool. Well let’s chalk up another one to experience.
While I’m not 100% certain, given the wording on the page, it seems that it will accomplish exactly the same thing as setting up 301 redirects for your site which I messed up by using the automatic upgrade plugin this summer. What I should have done was set it up anyways as a nice safety net, just in case something went wrong with the redirects. I have now, in the hopes that it might speed things along a little. There’s no reason for me to believe it will, but I can hope 
One note that I’d like to make is that while it can be a great backup to a proper redirect, it should never replace your redirects. The reason is that it’s Google specific and it’s an internal system. If you set up your redirects properly, they’ll work for everyone and everything that visits your website.
Google Sitemaps, life lessons
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2 responses so far ↓
1 John // Sep 17, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Hi,
I saw Matt Cutts talking on his blog about this (canonicalization). He said do the same thing (set up the 301’s). And he said be careful about doing this - here’s his excerpt: If I want to get rid of domain.com but keep www.domain.com, should I use the url removal tool to remove domain.com?
A: No, definitely don’t do this. If you remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, it can end up removing your whole domain for six months. Definitely don’t do this. If you did use the url removal tool to remove your entire domain when you actually only wanted to remove the www or non-www version of your domain, do a reinclusion request and mention that you removed your entire domain by accident using the url removal tool and that you’d like it reincluded.
2 Marc // Sep 18, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Yeah, asking to one of those removed would be a really bad idea
The 301 redirects take care of everything nicely. Up until you wipe out your htaccess file