preferred domain in webmaster tools

[fine0023]

I recently read this information here: http://support.google.com/webmasters...n&answer=44231 that generally recommends switching your settings in Google Webmaster Tools to have a preferred domain of either the www or non-www version of your site (I guess to help your site rank better by not having inbound links spread between "www.domain.com" and just "domain.com"). The choices it give you are "don't set a preferred domain" (what I currently have it set as), "display urls as www.domain.com" or "display urls as domain.com"

I assume in most cases, I would want to set it to one of the latter choices. However, I already have a 301 redirect in my .htaccess to make the non-www version of my url go to the www version. So would choosing a preferred domain in Google still be necessary even with the 301 redirect?

[felgall]

The 301 handles the redirect on your site.

The preferred domain setting tells Google to treat one as the other when it looks at links to your site from other sites before it follows them to your site. If you don't set a preference then the www and non-www versions of links will be treated as initially pointing to different sites and it will only be if Google decides to follow them that it will find out that one permanently redirects to the other. So by telling Google the preferred version in the first place you make its job easier. Google might use that as a factor in determining where to put the page in the search results.