Introduction

The preferred domain is the one that you would liked used to index your site’s pages (sometimes this is referred to as the canonical domain). Links may point to your site using both the www and non-www versions of the URL (for instance, http://www.example.com and http://example.com). The preferred domain is the version that you want used for your site in the search results.

Steps

Lets say you’d like Google to specify your preferred domain to index it. Kindly follow the steps that are provided from Google:

1. On the Search Console Home page, click the site you want
2. Click the gear icon, and then click Site Settings
3. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want

You may need to verify ownership of both the www and non-www versions of your domain. Because setting a preferred domain impacts both crawling and indexing, we need to ensure that you own both versions. Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case. Generally, once you have verified one version of the domain, we can easily verify the other using the original verification method. However, if you’ve removed the file, meta tag, or DNS record, you’ll need to repeat the verification steps.

Note: Once you’ve set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer.

Disclaimer: We’ve used the content from article written by Google.

Outcome

By the end of this article, you should be able to specify your preferred domain in the search engine.