Is "Preferred Domain" helping Google understand your site better?

[trinorthlighting]

Since google came out with the preferred domain and many of us flipped the switch, has google started to understand your sites better? Have you noticed any flucuations in serps?

[hvacdirect]

Not one bit. Checking the site command with and without the www show the exact same results.

[ratzmilk]

After setting the prefered domain for one of my sites, I ended up with both domain.com and www.domain.com in the search results and the site then disappeard down to page 50 from page 2. Had never had a duplicate problem before then, thought an ounce of prevention might be better than a pound of cure.

I swear, the day I clicked it, I felt a disturbance in the force, like thousands of Google employees crying out 'SUCKER!'.

[hvacdirect]

I think like anything with google, if you've got 800,000 links pointing to your site and a page rank of 10 the tool will be real effective fast, but for the other 99.9% of the world it will take months or years to work, much like a 301 redirect, that all other search engines can follow in days but google fumbles for months.

[texasville]

I did not touch that button. I have a sitewide 301 redirect in place from non-www to www and if that doesn't take care of it then Google's magic button sure won't.
I just want to know...is Billy Gates really smarter than the boys over at Google? I mean, MSN or even Y! don't have these canonical problems....what is it with G?

[g1smd]

>> Checking the site command with and without the www show the exact same results. <<

Even after they pick up the fact you want www to be listed, they will continue to show supplemental results for non-www URLs for up to a year.

Your measure of success is in making sure that www URLs are fully indexed, not in seeing how quick the non-www URLs are de-listed.

And that is a very important point. [webmasterworld.com...]

[Bewenched]

We implemented using google sitemaps in november of last year.. had a pretty good winter and spring .. then late spring BAM .. seriously supplimental.

It had stayed that way until I selected a preferred domain even though we did have a 301 in place for well over a month.

Once it was selected google has been visiting more often. Of course that was just our experience and we had made significant changes to the site to make it more crawlable and double and triple checked that there were not avenues for duplicate content and no way for it to be spidered under ssl.

[trinorthlighting]

We noticed today that the back link update that the links corrected themselves for the www vs. non www on one of our sites.