Preferred domain is set, undesired url still displayed

[andylc0714]

I have set my preferred domain (both point to www.example.com) last Dec. but example.com/newpage.html still shows in SERP as after 2 days when i added the new page, and www.example.com/newpage.html is not indexed.I have not built inbound links for it and have not added the new page to sitemap.xml, i'm not sure if it matters as google always automatically index new pages...

[edited by: tedster at 4:59 pm (utc) on July 7, 2008]
[edit reason] use example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

This is the first such report I've seen, but it doesn't surprise me all that much. It never seemd like a good idea to depend exclusively on the WMT preferred version setting alone. Also Google doesn't guarantee that they will always abide by it. The only sure thing is doing a 301 redirect from the not-preferred version to the preferred version.

Technical details for the redirect will be specific to your server and they can best be discussed in either of our Apache [webmasterworld.com] or Windows IIS [webmasterworld.com] forums.

[g1smd]

I *never* set a preference in WMT. I always force the domain using the 301 redirect in .htaccess. I always run Xenu LinkSleuth to make sure that there are no internal links pointing to the wrong version within the site.

Users should never hit a redirect when traversing the internal navigation.

I have seen the wrong version stay listed for a considerable time, when a high PR link has pointed at that wrong version. However it has dropped to supplemental for quite a while before vanishing. In general, Google doesn't like to list URLs that can't be generated by the internal navigation within the site, but they can and often do list them for a while.

[andylc0714]

thanks for help..

now the problem has been solved.

i didn't use the 301 redirect, but just added the page to sitemap.xml and resubmited it,then replaced the relative address with abusolute address.

I'm not sure if the result comes from those actions...