I uploaded a new site with a domain name https://example.com
(actually the domain consists of 3 words concatenated together).
If i do a google search for those three words in Google, the site does NOT appear in the results. In other search engines (the duck one, the tree planting one & the bill gates one) it appears right at the top even though I have not registered the site with them.
Google search console gives me this error "Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical". & in the report it says
Indexing
User-declared canonical: None
Google-selected canonical: https://www.example.com/
In other words, it has chosen the WWW version instead of the non-WWW version.
I did not know about WWW/non-WWW & HTTP/HTTPS URLs when I made the site last week. Now I do and I think the .htaccess
file redirects everything to the non-WWW, HTTPS version. https://index.com/index.html
is also redirected to https://example.com
in that file.
Aside from this, the sitemap only has 2 entries - one to https://example.com
& another to a solitary PDF file. The robots.txt
file essentially allows everything. I have put a rel="canonical"
link in the index HTML page as follows:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/" />
I am thinking of deleting the site from the web host, getting Google search console to look for (& not find) the pages & thus return 404. & then re-uploading it. Is doing so sensible or stupid? Are there are any gotchas? If it is not a workable solution, what a workable solution might be?
.htaccess
? – MrWhite Oct 8 '20 at 23:12