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I have a website without a google webmaster account connected to it. I want to install an SSL certificate on it.

After doing that, What is the best practice in order to submit the site to google? Should I add it as HTTPS + WWW, and from that account submit an XML sitemap of HTTPS + WWW URLs of all my pages? can indexing such URLs increase my chances to rank higher?

What about creating my site webmaster account without WWW or with HTTP?

The same question goes for Bing Webmaster tools.

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  • Is there any reason why you don't connect your site to Google search console? It really gives good data, specially when you migrate your site from http to https.
    – Goyllo
    May 25, 2018 at 4:35

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First of all, you do not really have to ever submit anything to Google. Your website will eventually be picked up (it goes really quickly actually, as long as you create a home page quickly after you purchased your domain name.)

On my end, I am removing all the "WWW" as you call them and use a 301 to send my users to the HTTPS version, always. Servers are so fast now a day, I don't see much reasons for not doing so.

That being said, the Google Console does let you enter both, but they are both viewed as separate websites.

That means one is going to be seen as a duplicate of the other, although I think Google understand that it happens within the same domain and probably doesn't penalize as much as when you have real duplicates inter-domain.

I actually have one site which I can't just all redirect to a single URL and I still get hits so I can tell that they have some way of knowing that URLs that match / are close enough, do not represent duplicate content.

As for which one to use, Matt Cutts says that the Google Search Engine does not really give a better chance to secure pages. However, from experience, I have seen Google results returning only the HTTPS results, no matter what. Also Google says here that it is preferable to use HTTPS if possible:

Google recommends that all websites use https:// when possible.

So my recommendation, if you can / don't mind, is to 301 all HTTP traffic to HTTPS. Even though Matt Cutts says it won't make a difference, on the sites where I've done so, I feel like they get more traffic (I changed a couple other things at the same time, but I'm pretty such this is a relatively strong factor.)

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  • 1. Google doesnt index all domain that is purchase just one day ago, I've bought one domain 2 month ago and I have normal index homepage and it is not index by Google at all. Audience is necessary to index any site, and it happen when you've some traffic from social media site or someone link your site. Or if you're using Google public DNS then they might index it. 2. Google is really good to recognize duplicate content, I don't think OP will face any problem if site is accessible on both protocol without any redirection. 3. As you said the good solution is 301 redirection from http to https
    – Goyllo
    May 25, 2018 at 4:30
  • @Goyllo, from my experience with GoDaddy and namecheap, my websites were visited by GoogleBot within 2 hours. That doesn't mean the site is indexed (as in searchable), obviously, but it was found and they start working on it. It will already be in their database that fast. Google Search Console will show that a site is found quickly too. Although it is a good idea to offer a sitemap.xml just because, but it's not required.
    – Alexis Wilke
    May 25, 2018 at 10:53

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