Webmaster Tool "preferred domain"-bad and good experiences

[kalthoff]

Hi everybody,

as always with Google, I'm quite uncertain what to do. In this case with the "preferred domain" option in the webmaster tools.

Our page is mostly linked to with www and never had any kanonical issues. It has PR 7. When I type in our URL name without the www it shows PR 3.

Now is it correct to conclude that if I set the preferred domain to "www", Google will count all links without "www" to my page as if they were with "www". Wouldn't that give my page a terrific boost with all those links that combine for PR 3?

Does anybody have any good or negative experience with this future? I'm afraid I might, for some reason, loose rankings when changing the setting to "www".

Best regards

[joelgreen]

Wouldn't that give my page a terrific boost with all those links that combine for PR 3

This is not the case.

PR is something like this (Note, i provided "real value" just for comparison, these are not correct, just to make explanation clearer):
1 - real value 100
2 - real value 1000
3 - real value 100000
4 - real value 10000000
...
7 - real value 1000000000000
...
10 - real value 10000000000000000

Now you have PR 7, and wonder if it would be significant PR change if it would add PR3? PR7(1000000000000) + PR3(100000) is still PR7

IMO, I may be wrong.

[kalthoff]

You are definately right about that. I'm 99% percent sure that our PR would stay at 7.

Nevertheless, external links that combine for a PR 3 should be a real boost for the ranking for each of our keywords.

The question is, if it works that way at all or if that feature might in some way hurt our rankings.