Problems with Google's Preferred Domain Option

[Drreggae]

I discovered the feature in the very end of december..can have been
29th, can have been 30th.

I switched one of my sites to using preferred domain,
without www. thinking it would look nicer in search results...

Over the last 20 days our fairly nice organic traffic from google
to that side started fading away, now down to less than 1/3 of end
december traffic.. Already feeling uncomfortable with the
apparent time co-incidence.. switched it to preferred domain with
www as nearly all external links to our site do use www.

Today looked again in sitemaps, and when looking at the external
links, it shows nothing anymore.. Also in google websearch
links:oursite just shows 4 links now, used to be much more..

So, I hope google quickly collects all these external links again
and gives us back our traffic.

[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 1:38 pm (utc) on Jan. 20, 2009]
[edit reason] Moved from another location [/edit]

[Shaddows]

Ye, if you have a sitemap with URLS of the form
http://example.com

and all you IBLs point to
http://www.example.com

you will show zero links (even if you 301 or use preferred domain)

There's a post from a Googler to that effect recently (within the last week I'm sure)

[Shaddows]

Sorry, I can't find the link. Anyone else remember the thread? Think it was a first time post from a googler.

Maybe I dreamt it.

[maddawg]

Shaddows, my understanding of the preferred domain option is that it will prevent exactly what you are describing.

From the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Is the preferred domain feature a filter or a redirect? Does it simply cause the search results to display on the URLs that are in the version I prefer?
The preferred domain feature is not a filter. When you set a preference, we:

* Consider all links that point to the site (whether those links use the www version or the non-www version) to be pointing at the version you prefer. This helps us more accurately determine PageRank for your pages.
* Once we know that both versions of a URL point to the same page, we try to select the preferred version for future crawls.
* Index pages of your site using the version you prefer. If some pages of your site are indexed using the www version and other pages are indexed using the non-www version, then over time, you should see a shift to the preference you've set.

[Shaddows]

No, all that says is that G is doing what you should do in .htaccess using mod_rewrite (i.e cannonicalisation using 301s to capture malformed URLs). .htaccess has the added advantage of actually making the URL on the browser address bar show the page you want it to- making it highly likely that new inbounds will go straight to the preferred domain.

What I was saying in my previous post is that the external link list only shows links that point directly at the preferred domain. Google (theoretically) still counts them, it just doesnt display on the report.

It might be considered buggy, but them lots of Google Webmaster Tools is buggy.

As I say, a Googler has posted to this effect, which I am merely paraphrasing. Try doing a site search [webmasterworld.com] (though I was unsuccessful, and I read the other thread!)

edit for spelling

[edited by: Shaddows at 8:56 am (utc) on Jan. 21, 2009]

[Drreggae]

Yes, well, I found them back again today, BUT in the non-www site I
also still have listed there (but it has the prefered domain set to
www. and in the non-www site listing it even recommends to look in
the www. listing because of the prefered domain setting..)..anyway
I hope they soon will "move" to the preferred domain listings, and
that this also brings back the traffic.

[Shaddows]

I think your traffic should recover (assuming the domain change is the cause), but as I say, the links are VERY SPECIFALLY the ones pointing directly at subdomain in question.

Not the ones Google is using to calculate PR, not the ones they are using to evaluate your site, but the ones where the url character string equals the url character string of the domain.

Anyway, I'm not an expert on this, I was merely restating an explanation I'm sure was in this forum (was certainly on these WebmasterWorld as Tedster replied back), so I'm going to leave this now. If I stumble across the other thread, I'll drop the URL in here.

[Shaddows]

Hmmm, actually I have links that are not pointing at the currect URL, so I might have got the wrong end of the stick or misunderstood what I was reading. Wish I could find that thread.

Probably your best recourse would be Google's Webmaster Help Forum [google.com]

[tedster]

This may be the thread you remember:

[quote from WMT Blog]
...The preferred domain feature is not a filter. When you set a preference, we:
Consider all links that point to the site (whether those links use the www version or the non-www version) to be pointing at the version you prefer. This helps us more accurately determine PageRank for your pages.
Once we know that both versions of a URL point to the same page, we try to select the preferred version for future crawls.

[quote from Matt Cutts]
- If you pick (say) www.example.com as your preferred root page, make sure that you have a permanent (301) redirect from pages such as example.com to www.example.com...

- To be extra safe, feel free to use google’s webmaster console to specify the preferred root page of your domain

[webmasterworld.com...]