Is Google Webmaster screwing with me??

[JBorhez]

I just got back from verifying a site in Google Webmaster and got hit with a bit of a curve ball.

It's giving me the following message:

Your site is indexed as http://mydomain.com/ not as
http://www.mydomain.com/. If you want to see all data for your site, you need to add and verify http://mydomain.com/ as well

A few questions if I may?

-Am I right to assume that a site MUST be indexed with www? Either way I want it with the www

-should I remove the http://mydomain.com/ ?

-is the site http://www.mydomain.com/ automatically indexed after the verification process?

-what's the best action if any?

Is 4 a few?

Thanks a lot warriors!

[tommygunn]

From what I understand, google treats www. and non www. sites as two different URL's. I don't believe it matters really, probably just means links to your site don't use the www. version. I don't think you NEED the www. version, but I would recommend if your building links to use the non www version, as its already indexed.

[anomaly]

definitely make sure that all your links are only going to the www or the non-www ... otherwise any page rank value will get split ...

the BEST thing to do is to go into cpanel (if you're using that) or whatever has your domain settings and either redirect all www to the non-www or vice versa ... this will mean that, e.g. a customer typing www.mydomain.com will be redirected to mydomain.com, and google will soon catch up on this

[TristanPerry]

Google treats them as different sites. This is completely normal.

What you need to do is add your www. site to webmaster tools too.

Then, once it's verified, go into settings and you can choose that Google show the www. version of your site (instead of the non-www. one)

Then they will crawl and index your www. site and in the search results it'll come up with the www. one.