(Entry was posted by Jarrett Gucci on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/16/2020).

What to do after switching from non-WWW to WWW

I just changed a site to load with WWW. What do I need to do with search console and any redirects?

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

George G.: 1. Validate your domain in search console with ns record and you dont have to do anything there.
2. Redirect all non-www to www via your web server. You can read your web server documentation for specific insructions.
Jarrett Gucci: I did all that but Google is still making the non-www the canonical and indexed version. All URLS on www are being non-indexed.
Jarrett Gucci: Any insights?
George G.: yes, redirects seem to work fine. canonicals too have the www. although I would put the https just to be sure. google recommends the absolute path https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066...

other than that, seems like google has started to pick up the www urls. It ll need time tho. Unless you dont go ahead and reindex them manually.â€¦See More
Jarrett Gucci: Did all that as well.
Dan Thies: Get in your time machine, get both versions running with canonical tags on both pointing to your preferred version. Update search console. Let that run for a week or so until they recrawl it all, then when site: searches only show your canonical version, implement the redirects.
Richard Hearne: Where do your internal links point? Do you have an XML sitemap - what URLs are in it? What values do you have in your canonicals? Are your redirects a non-301 status code? What`s in your robots.txt?