Changing the Preferred Domain in Google Webmaster Tools resulted in zero stats

Question

I set my Preferred Domain for my website with www in Google Webmaster Tools, then I added the following code to my .htaccess file:

  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$
  RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Then I added the non-www version of my website to Google Webmaster Tools, but all the charts went down to zero in that version. However, changing back to www version, I saw a small decrease in impressions, etc...

My question is if that's normal for my website? If so, then what do I have to do with the non-www version in my Google Webmaster Tools account that doesn't have any indexed pages, sitemaps, etc...?

Answer 1

I suspect that there are two things happening. For the non-www, that is actually the correct behavior. The metrics should drop to 0 except that I noticed in mine the Search Traffic / Search Queries page is identical from non-www to www. But all the rest of the metrics should be basically non-existent. That may take a while. And that is what you told Google you wanted.

The drop for the www side of the coin just may be coincidental or really really simple to explain. It may just be the case where the placement in the SERPs have to work themselves out because you had essentially two sets of pages listed prior. In this case, your www versions of the pages will rise over a period of time. Give it about 30-60 days to really settle out and I am sure that your stats for www will improve.