I am very new to all of this SEO stuff and I have developed a highly targeted strategy for getting my sites ranked. I need help so I do not screw it up. I had posted earlier in another forum saying that one of my sites had increased to PR-1 and that I had very much ignored that site since I finished it. While my money site which I work 50 hours a week on had remained unchanged. Then this morning I signed on and my Money site is now PR-4 and my SERPS have shot up. I had recently fixed a canonical URL problem making mysite consistently redirect to the home page at the non www URL because my wordpress blog which is getting indexed regularly followed that format. Now most of my link building was done using the www form of the domain and my site moved from 134 to 64 in SERPs for my top and most competitive keywords. The version of the homepage indexed by google is the www version. Should I change my prefferred domain back to the www version of the URL? Do I risk losing any of these gains by doing so? Do you think any of this was due to my setting a canonical domain or just a timing coincidence?
the canonicalization should not have a negative impact if you used the right status code in your redirect (301)