G Sitemaps - Changing the preferred domain due to inbound links

[Gumball Monkey]

I've been using Google Sitemaps for about six months now, setting my preferred domain to http://www.example.com.

However, I have recently reviewed incoming links on Google and found the following:

link: www.example.com - 422
link: example.com - 12400

Given this, should I clear the preference and use the latter URL as preference? I have examined much larger sites, and i've seen similar results.

[edited by: tedster at 4:55 pm (utc) on April 25, 2007]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it will never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

My own thinking is that this will not affect your rankings, if that's what you have in mind. The key is to use the 301 redirect on your site.

Here's some information from Google:

The preferred domain feature is not a filter. When you set a preference, we:

Consider all links that point to the site (whether those links use the www version or the non-www version) to be pointing at the version you prefer. This helps us more accurately determine PageRank for your pages.

Once we know that both versions of a URL point to the same page, we try to select the preferred version for future crawls.

Index pages of your site using the version you prefer. If some pages of your site are indexed using the www version and other pages are indexed using the non-www version, then over time, you should see a shift to the preference you've set.

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

[Gumball Monkey]

Many thanks. :)