301, Canonical, and Page Authority
-
I have been trying to find an answer to this question for awhile now but I am having trouble.
I have a clients site that I need to redirect and Canonical the pages to correct duplicate content issues and title tags however, the issue with this client is that some of the www. pages have a higher PA than non-www and the reverse is true. I am wondering if there is an issue with chasing the PA to get the highest PA per page (even if this means the site is going to be a mix of www. and non-www. pages)?
I am extremely new to SEO so I apologize ahead of time if I missed this in the forum.
-
Jarno,
Thank you for the answer. Great insight!! I appreciate your help with this issue.
-
Dear Andrea,
You don't have to apologize when you ask a question. Everyone started off at the beginning with SEO and we all had to learn one way or the other. Like my father used to say: There is no such thing as a dumb question....(I strongly disagree with him however...;-p
For your question I don't really think there is one short answer. Best case situations are always the hardest to describe but I can tell you this from my own experience with redirecting and canonicalization of url's. Do not mix up the www. and non-www. www. is a subdomain of your name.com (so www. is a subdomain of test.com just as cms.test.com is a subdomain). Using 2 versions will only make things far more complicated then you are looking for. I would choose just one version of the site. Personally I use www.domainname.com because www. is what people associate with internet but non-www is also perfectly fine (it might even be a little better for SEO since your working on your rootdomain but I'm not 100% sure about that).
Don't focus to much on the value of a page after all when you redirect 301 to a new page you'll redirect linkjuice just as well so the new page will become higher scoring in time. Be carefull with the canonical tag, it's just used to tell the search engines which page is the original one. When you use canonical the wrong way you might undo everything you're trying to do with 301 redirects (for instance moving a site from one place to another).
Well I hope my answer was a bit helpful to you. If not, please let me know what you want to know and I'll try to help you as good as I can.
kind regards
Jarno
-
Great! Thank you for clarifying that!
-
Hi Andrea,
If you are going to 301 either all www to non www pages or vice versa then you will be consolidating both page versions into one and you do not really need to worry about chasing the PA as you say. 301s pass along almost all of the link value etc from the original page to the final page.
It is more to the point to decide which version you want to use (www or non), implement the 301s and then just be consistent in regards linking and usage from then on. I suppose it is good practice to limit unneeded 301s as much as possible, so if you have no other reason to go with one version or the other then the version with the most external links might be the best one to choose for the final urls.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Page rank check
Hello everyone, How long should I wait to see if page rank for optimized pages have improved? cheers
On-Page Optimization | | PremioOscar0 -
Losing Page Rank after 301 redirect from http to www
Hi Guys I have site-wide redirected all http// to www and all the category pages lost their page ranks (except home page). I would like to know if this is normal and is it one of the possible causes in losing keyword ranking?
On-Page Optimization | | ilovebodykits0 -
Canonical Help?
This canonical thing is brand new to me and I'm trying to wrap my mind around it. Here is my situation: I use Wordpress. I am showing duplicate content with the following url's http://crosstrainingandfitness.com/online-workout-blog/ http://crosstrainingandfitness.com/online-workout-blog/page/2/ Would setting a canonical link solve this? If so, what do I put in the Canonical box for this category (online workout blog). I use Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin. Any help is greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | carbbon0 -
Should one page with markers or six separate pages?
Hi - I'm working on a site that was set up with 6 bios on one page, with markers jumping to each person's name. I was thinking about separating those into 6 different pages, but not sure if that's the right thing to do. Advice about keeping the bios on one page vs splitting them up? (Am I more likely to rank for those peoples' names if I have a unique page, or is the one page url with each different marker in it, just as good?) Ranking well for those names isn't a huge goal of the site, but it would be nice to make the choice that would help with that rank. Thanks for your input Emma
On-Page Optimization | | emmas0 -
Correct use of Canonical link vs 301 redirect
Hi All, Seeking yet more advice. SEOMOZ tools have told me I have duplicate content on one of my sites and I am keen to clean this up. I am not to familiar with the following so thought I would ask. The duplicate content is shown on : www.mysite.com www.mysite.com/index.html Obviously I only see index.html when I check the code so what is the best method of resolving the duplicate content, Canonical or 301? Can you give me an example 🙂 Thanks all
On-Page Optimization | | wedmonds0 -
Rel Canonical
I will be quick and to the point. I am clearly a novice. I received a notice on my seomoz account that I had 12 pages with a Rel Canonical issue. It seems serious. Can this be a quick fix? Any thoughts? Below is the site address. petbarnpdx.com Thanks in advance for any input on this! Dave
On-Page Optimization | | APICDA0 -
Keyword cannabilization ... I just cant face 301'ing good, well aged pages
Hi Mozzers Ive read a little about your views on cannabilization and would like to run my situation by you. I have 2 pages lets say (a) and (b) that rank ok for a main keyword. However (a) desite being nice and old is not ageing well and is starting to slip a little - its getting harder to spread the link juice so Ive been thinking should I ditch page (a) and focus solely on page (b) for this keyword. Page (b) seems to be getting better serp value right now. What I find hard is that page (a) has been around a while (6 years) and I cant bring myself to 301 it assuming thats what you would normally do to avoid cannabilization. But at the end of the day its a business page and if its failing - yet could inject even more bounce into page (b) it must be worth considering. What is the best way forward here..? Im not sure how quick any transition of link juice would take ? Also what to do with the unique content on page (a)? Seems such a shame to just ditch it. Cheers fella's Morch
On-Page Optimization | | Morch0 -
Page Authority
I have recently optimised a set of images for a client of ours: I'm looking through all the PA of these newly optimised images, and have varying PA {from SEOmoz toolbar} I understand that internal linking will pass link juice, and obviously external links will add to the overall PA. I have several pages with a PA of 36: { Fairly deep pages} Yet they have no external or internal links going to them. My question is "How can a page gain any authority when it has no visible links pointing at it?" Obviously there must be a link pointing at it {internally} as Google wouldn't have crawled the page right? Also lets say all the keywords are of equal competitiveness would the keywords with highest PA rank higher than those on O PA pages. Many Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Yozzer0