Modifying the DNS CNAME to make "www" URLs fail

[courier]

I have been considering taking drastic steps that in theroy would take all links to my domain away in one step.

Modify the DNS CNAME, removing the www to @. This will mean everyone including Google will get a 404 for the site url with www, (which most of my links point to) but sitename . com without www. will display and be available

Has anyone ever done this? I do not want to start a new site as the domain I have is my company name.

[edited by: tedster at 4:01 am (utc) on Feb 22, 2013]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[n00b1]

This may not be what you want to hear but this is something I've tried myself and it didn't have the desired effect.

I have a thread sharing the process I went through here - [webmasterworld.com...]

Essentially, as confirmed by Google's John Mueller, Google still treats the website as a whole algorithmically. Obviously the links pointing to one version or the other (and setting preferred version in WMT) helps a bit but there are still overriding associations which you can't shed.

What happened to me is that I was caught up in this associative part of the algorithm. Some time afterwards I was given a manual penalty for exactly the same reason despite me having no unnatural links pointing to the non-www version of the site. I ended up getting a new domain in the end (different TLD) and haven't looked back.