Depending on how you set up your .htaccess file (refer to Chapter 7, robots.txt, .htaccess, and W3C Validation), you can access your Drupal site using a www or not. For example, http://www.yourDrupalsite.com/ or http://yourDrupalsite.com/ both will point to the front page of your site. This is not ideal because Google may treat those two URLs as two different pages and assume they contain totally different content. You'd actually be competing with yourself in Google and that's not a good thing.

Fortunately, you can fix this problem using the preferred domain setting. The preferred domain is the one that you would like used to index your site's pages and to have show up in Google. If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.yourDrupalsite.com and Google finds a link to your site that is formatted as http://yourDrupalsite.com, they'll treat that link as if it was http://www.yourDrupalsite.com. In addition, Google will take your preference into account when displaying URLs in the search results.

If you are on a slow server, you may want to consider asking Google to be a bit more considerate about how much data it grabs from your site at a time. This is called the crawl rate. It doesn't effect how often Google visits, just how many pages they ask for at a time. It can be very helpful if you're experiencing a server slowdown.