Webmaster Tools "preferred domain" - affect on rankings?

[kalthoff]

Hi,

I'm still wondering, if anybody has seen a change in ranking when messing around with the "preffered domain" feature in the Google Webmaster Tools.

Our page is mostly linked to with www.domain.com. It has PR 7. When I type in our URL name without the www (domain.com) it shows PR 3.

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 in ranking with those links being counted as www then?

I'm afraid I might, for some reason, loose rankings when changing the preferred setting to "www".