Preferred domain name on Google Sitemaps

Do you have incoming links to your blog in http://www.***.blogspot.com format and http://***.blogspot.com format? The bad news is that Google treat each links differently, as if they are pointing to 2 different pages. This is the reason why my http://marhgil.blogspot.com currently has a Pagerank of 5 and http://www.marhgil.blogspot.com has a Pagerank of 3. Imagine if these links were treated as one, counting all the links to http://www.marhgil.blogspot.com the same as a link to http://marhgil.blogspot.com, then, I might have a higher Pagerank, right?

Now, here is the good news. I recently signed-up with Google Sitemaps, and from there, I found out that you can tell Google your preferred domain name. I set my preferred domain name as http://marhgil.blogspot.com. A link to http://www.marhgil.blogspot.com will be counted as the same as a link to http://marhgil.blogspot.com. And since I set it up as my preferred domain name, http://www.marhgil.blogspot.com will no longer be displayed on their index.

This is one great feature that any SEO practitioner must use. Right? For more information about this feature, visit Google Help Center here.


Technorati Tags: Blog optimization, blogtimization, preferred domain name, Google sitemaps