It’s common for a website to have the same content on multiple URLs. For example, it might have the same content on http://example.com/ as on https://www.example.com/index.html. To make things easier, when our systems recognize that, we’ll pick one URL as the “canonical” for Search. You can still tell us your preference in multiple ways if there’s something specific you want us to pick (see paragraph below). But if you don’t have a preference, we’ll choose the best option we find. Note that with the deprecation we will no longer use any existing Search Console preferred domain configuration.

You can find detailed explanations on how to tell us your preference in the Consolidate duplicate URLs help center article. Here are some of the options available to you:

1. Use rel=”canonical” link tag on HTML pages
2. Use rel=”canonical” HTTP header
3. Use a sitemap
4. Use 301 redirects for retired URLs

Send us any feedback either through Twitter or our forum.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate