Google announced on Tuesday June 18, 2019 that webmasters have no need to configure their own preferred domain. It’s common for a website to have the same content on multiple URLs. For example, it might have the same content on http://example.com/ as on https://www.example.com/index.html. To make things easier, when Google systems recognize that, Google bot will pick one URL as the “canonical” for Search. You can still tell us your preference in multiple ways if there’s something specific you want Google search to pick (see paragraph below). But if you do not have a preference, Google bot will choose the best search option.
Note that with the deprecation Google will no longer use any existing Search Console preferred domain configuration. You can find detailed explanations on how to tell us your preference in the Consolidate duplicate URLs help center article. Here are some of the options available to you:
- Use rel=”canonical” link tag on HTML pages
- Use rel=”canonical” HTTP header
- Use a sitemap
- Use 301 redirects for retired URLs
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