Webmaster Tools "Set preferred domain"

Do you bother to "set preferred domain" in google webmaster tools?

I have never seen the difference between leaving "dont set a preferred domain" and actually setting one.


Have you?


thanks

You may ignore preferred domain. You can see the difference if you have many cached posts. And for newer posts, there is no difference between them.

Hello wallofiron,

You would have to choose "set preferred domain" if you don't want your inbound link's link juice distributed. The thing is Google will set the hxxp://yoursite.com and hxxp://www.yoursite.com as two separate pages, distributing the link juice respectively. I read an article about this as I have the same confusion as you are when I set up my site. Here's the link: http://www.zubrag.com/articles/increasing-pagerank-google-sitemaps-webmaster-tools.php

You'll read it on the last parts of the article.

enes9 said:

Hello wallofiron,

You would have to choose "set preferred domain" if you don't want your inbound link's link juice distributed. The thing is Google will set the hxxp://yoursite.com and hxxp://www.yoursite.com as two separate pages, distributing the link juice respectively. I read an article about this as I have the same confusion as you are when I set up my site. Here's the link: http://www.zubrag.com/articles/increasing-pagerank-google-sitemaps-webmaster-tools.php

You'll read it on the last parts of the article.

Click to expand...

What you set in Google W has more of a display function than anything else. The way to kill your canocalization issues is through a 301 redirect from the non-www to the www version of your site. If you do that it makes little to no difference in terms of actual SEO what you set up in GW. On the other hand, if you have duplicate pages on your site, setting whatever in GW will not help you.

Just do a 301 redirect and don't worry about GW too much.