When I search in Google, my website comes up “MySite.com”.
How do I get listed as “www.MySite.com”???
Debbie
you can use rel=canonical for that
here’s matt cutts… http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Join Google Webmaster tools. Register the website as one of your sites and then tell Google that you want the url always displayed as www.etc…
You will initially need to register your site twice; once with and once without the www. so that you can prove that you control the site. Google gives you a meta string that looks like this:
<meta name=“google-site-verification” content=“iNKDI6NXLulB4g_ToefJU_0n-wTUh84n_iU”>
You need to put it in the head of your home page and then click the verify button in your Webmaster tools page. When you have verified both sites, you can remove the one without the www.
Or you can forget about google (who I thought is the only one who reads/understands the proprietary canonical meta tag?.. what about all the other search engines?? Google is NOT the only one and even if they are TODAY the biggest on the planet, do you want to have to change a bunch of stuff when some young upstart beats them down?) and just set up your server accordingly: anyone accessing your site with the www just gets your site with www in the address… however anyone accessing your site WITHOUT the www gets a 301 redirect to the www version.
Redirects also tell search engines (and user agents) “this is the NEW, PERMANENT address” and so after enough time they will update to reflect that.
If you know of any sites/pages that link to your site without the leading www, ask them to update their links so there aren’t still outdated and redirected links.
If you’re running Apache this is pretty easy to set up.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\\.yoursite\\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.yoursite.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301, L]