Google Webmaster Tools: Show results with "WWW", but SERP still showing without WWW

Google Webmaster Tools: Show results with "WWW", but SERP still showing without WWW - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about google, google-search-console, google-search, search-results to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Google Webmaster Tools: Show results with "WWW", but SERP still showing without WWW.Problem :

I have a client site running under the root domain, e.g. without www: http://example.com.

However, the client requested that URLs be shown with WWW on the Google search results page. The actual URL used when accessing the website should still not show the WWW.

I have gone and updated the settings accordingly in Google Webmaster Tools, as outlined here:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/5963681/278840

This has been done around 2-3 months ago, yet Google still shows the results without the WWW.

Does it really take that long for this change to propagate across the SERP, or is there something else that I have to change?

Solution :

...the client requested that URLs be shown with WWW on the Google search results page. The actual URL used when accessing the website should still not show the WWW.

That's completely backward and is never going to work. If you are redirecting all traffic to the bare domain (without www) then that is the URL that's going to be shown in the SERPs, regardless of what you "try" to tell Google in the Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) property.

In setting the preferred domain as www and redirecting to the bare domain you are creating a conflict that Google must now resolve. Google is not going to return a redirected URL in the SERPs (other than maybe a site: search).

You need to decide what the canonical URL should be; with www or without (or something else entirely). Then use the canonical URL everywhere.

If the issue about google, google-search-console, google-search, search-results is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.