So what is a preferred domain? The preferred domain is the one that you would liked used to index your site’s pages (sometimes this is referred to as the canonical domain). Links may point to your site using both the www and non-www versions of the URL (for instance, http://www.example.com and http://example.com). The preferred domain is the version that you want used for your site in the search results. By not setting a preferred domain, your www. and non-www version of the web site may be seen as duplicate content. And this would be bad!
If for some reason you cannot find your web site in Google when you type in www.example.com. Try example.com instead. Google may see the non-www version as the preferred domain.
So how can you set a preferred domain? You can set a preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools. This is usually the first thing we check for our SEO clients. Here’s how to do it:
To specify your preferred domain (Source: Google):
1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Site configuration, click Settings.
3. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want.You may need to reverify ownership of your sites. Because setting a preferred domain impacts both crawling and indexing, we need to ensure that you own both versions. Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case. Generally, once you have verified one version of the domain, we can easily verify the other using the original verification method. However, if you’ve removed the file, meta tag, or DNS record, you’ll need to repeat the verification steps.
Note: Once you’ve set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer.
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