Ok, we own both the www and the non www versions of our domains, and host all of our sites on our own servers. If our site is accessed via the www version the site comes up, if they are accessed via the non- www version of the address our groups site comes up. (example: http://www.excelalternatives.com and http://excelalternatives.com). 2 different sites, both owned by us, on the same server. I am trying to set the preferred domain to only show the www version, but I am told that ownership can not be verfied (and I assume because the verification code is not on the groups site, but is on the schools site). Can we just put the verification code in the group site, verify then remove it again, or will that drop the preferred domain back off? what can we do aside from changing our server settings to point to the www version either way (which I do not understand why they do that anyways).
The preferred domain setting is designed for situations in which www.example.com and example.com both lead to the same site. If both URLs lead to the same content, we could show either one in our search results, and the preferred domain tool would let you pick which version you'd prefer we display.
In your case, however, your www and non-www URLs lead to different content, so there's no confusion about which URL we should store in our index. If we want to reference your schools content, we'll use www.excelalternatives.com; and if we want to reference your groups content, we'll use excelalternatives.com.
The reason you're getting an "ownership cannot be verified" message is because we check for your verification meta tag on both domains (www and non-www) before allowing you to set a preferred domain, just to make sure that they point to the same place. Since yours point to two different sites, this message is telling you that it didn't find the www verification meta tag on the non-www site (which makes sense, since they're not the same site).
What are you trying to accomplish? Do you want Google not to show your groups (non-www) content in our index? If so, you could put up a robots.txt file (at http://excelalternatives.com/robots.txt) telling robots not to crawl/index the non-www version of your site. Otherwise, I'm not sure what result you're trying to achieve. If you could clarify, we can give you some better advice on how to go about it.
The problem was that if we went to google and search for the one of the schools, some of the results would bring content that lead to the non-www version of the website, which is not school related. This does not seem to be a problem now for some reason, I added the non-www version of the site to my dashboard and verified it, maybe that solved my problem, i dont know, but thanks for your response, it did help clear up the perfered domain feature a little for me.
> The preferred domain setting is designed for situations in whichwww.example.comand example.com both lead to the same site. If both > URLs lead to the same content, we could show either one in our search > results, and the preferred domain tool would let you pick which > version you'd prefer we display.
> In your case, however, your www and non-www URLs lead to different > content, so there's no confusion about which URL we should store in > our index. If we want to reference your schools content, we'll usewww.excelalternatives.com;and if we want to reference your groups > content, we'll use excelalternatives.com.
> The reason you're getting an "ownership cannot be verified" message is > because we check for your verification meta tag on both domains (www > and non-www) before allowing you to set a preferred domain, just to > make sure that they point to the same place. Since yours point to two > different sites, this message is telling you that it didn't find the > www verification meta tag on the non-www site (which makes sense, > since they're not the same site).
> What are you trying to accomplish? Do you want Google not to show your > groups (non-www) content in our index? If so, you could put up a > robots.txt file (athttp://excelalternatives.com/robots.txt) telling > robots not to crawl/index the non-www version of your site. Otherwise, > I'm not sure what result you're trying to achieve. If you could > clarify, we can give you some better advice on how to go about it.
