How Much Does a Missing www. 301 redirect hurt a business?
-
We're preparing a report for a potential client, and are trying to figure out a way to estimate rankings gains. One of the major issues is a lack of a 301 redirect for non-www. domains to www. domains.
We checked and there's no canonicalization, so it's a clear issue. According to Google, the non-www. links from 8 different domains. The www. version of the website has links from 248 different domains. Nearly all anchor text is branded, as they've never had any SEO work done before.
Does anyone have a suggestion for approximating benefits of setting up their .htaccess file correctly? Would the benefits even be that great? We're of course advising additional things, but we just want to be more certain about this step's SEO-boost.
-
Thanks! We were of course definitely going to fix it - I was just wondering if anyone had ever tested out a quantifiable answer for how much it would help. But as you pointed out, it's usually just one small change among many, so it's slightly hard to tell exactly. Much appreciate your thorough explanation!
-
Correcting canonical issues is just a sound SEO best practice and has the following clear benefits:
- It consolidates PageRank, DA and Page authority through one uniform URL structure
- It eliminates possible on-site duplicated issues by preventing two version of the same page from arising.
- It consolidates social shares through one URL structure
- It consolidates incoming links into one structure ensuring you get full authority to both www. and non-www URLs.
- It's user-friendly, and ensures that bookmarking and linking is done uniformly.
- It's a W3C best design practice and helps "future-proof" your URL structure.
If you want to "quantify" this to your clients all the above is where I'd start. Even though Google and Bing both make it easy to physically choose "how" you want your site to display in search results, hiccups still occur. And again, if you are indexed by your www. URLs, but are still accumulating links and social shares to your non-WWW URLs, you absolutely won't get the full algorithmic ranking benefit for these URLs until you put the redirects in place.
In sum, this is just a smart SEO practice and is a MUST correct item on any SEO audit checklist. I've seen situations were putting in the .htaccess file in place or adding server side redirects has immediately increased a site's PageRank and overall DA authority. This is usually the norm.
I'd certainly fix it, and you should as well. Hope that was helpful!
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
-
After 301 redirection non-English keyword points to English language pages
We had multilingual website on .co.uk domain and somewhere in April, we've done 301 redirection from domain1.co.uk pages which were in Polish language to domain2.com/pl domain and now for some Polish keywords Google SERP sometimes shows English pages (.com) and sometimes polish pages (.com/pl). Previously co.uk/en had English content and that got redirected to .com. What could be the reason? Thank you for all responses.
On-Page Optimization | | Optimal_Strategies0 -
Is it OK to 301 redirect 1000s of duplicate random URLs to homepag?
Hello, We found a critical error in our site internal link structure and the way Google indexes it. Website has 1000s of URLs that are basically 50% match to homepage. They all start the same example.com/category/random/random I can do a redirect match and 301 them to homepage. This way 1000s of bogus url are not indexed and no value given. Is it OK to redirect so many URLs to homepage? Platform is creating these URLs because of search query, where it adds all site content to one page. Currently this search page /category / has own canonical and all those duplicate content URLs have canonical to that /category /. To fix my plan is to a. Remove canonical from /category / that way all those duplicate URLs don't have it either. B. Redirect match all URLs that have /category / in them to homepage. (this is most important page where 50% of that content is and should be the main page). Is this plan ok?
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud1 -
No difference anymore between 301 and 302
According to http://searchengineland.com/google-no-pagerank-dilution-using-301-302-30x-redirects-anymore-254608 What do you think?
On-Page Optimization | | nans0 -
Inventory Pages that are Sold, 404 vs 301?
I am working with a company that sells high-priced automobiles. Each Unit has its own URL We currently leave most sold inventory live on the site as it draws in many leads (the units are visually shown as sold, so it shouldn't be a UX issue in most cases). We are wanting to start pruning some old units (this is in WordPress - custom post type) and I'm not quite sure what the best solution for this site is with removed units. Some ideas: Remove the units pages that are no longer needed, resulting in any links 404'ing to a useful 404 page. Remove the units pages, and 301 them to the Homepage (I don't really want to do this, as it seems like really poor UX) Remove the units page, and 301 the user to a specific "This item has sold" page that is shared by all sold units, but may not be the sites full 404. another option I haven't thought of? I dont' want to do anything that would confuse or get search engines upset, and I'm not sure how bad 404's are, I see some info on how bad they are, some that say they aren't bad. I'm guessing it is as usual, some gray area in the middle.
On-Page Optimization | | Andy_Staple0 -
Moving from Bigcommerce to Woocommerce on WP. Should we redirect size pages into one page?
We are moving from Bigcommerce to Woocommerce on WP. On Bigcommerce, due to some bizarre reasoning the previous developer had 3 separate URLS for the same product in different sizes - S, M and L. Now we plan to have one product page where the sizes can be selected and 301 redirect the 3 urls to the new one. Is this advisable? Or should we just have 3 separate pages. OR should we have one of the sizes pages as the new page and then redirect the other 2 to this one? I ask this because the site has a LOT of ranking power and we do not want to jeopardise that.
On-Page Optimization | | MashBonigala0 -
Acquired Old, Bad Content Site That Ranks Great. Redirect to Content on My Site?
Hello. my company acquired another website. This website is very old, the content within is decent at best, but still manages to rank very well for valuable phrases. Currently, we're leaving the entire site active on its own for its brand, but i'd like to at least redirect some of the content back to our main website. I can't justify spending the time to create improved content on that site and not our main site though. What would be the best practice here? 1. Cross-domain canonical - and build the new content on our main website? 2. 301 Redirect Old Article to New Location containing better article 3. Leave the content where it is - you won't be able to transfer the ranking across domain. Thanks for your input.
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
Is this good practise for SEO: www.example.com/testing-once/testing-once.aspx?
My web developer is telling me that it is best practice for SEO to place your keyword in your URL twice. For Example: www.example.com/testing-once/testing-once.aspx. I'm sure that this is not true, could you please help?
On-Page Optimization | | CoGri0 -
Question regarding two versions of a page (redirect)
At one point in my SEO journey I had noticed some duplicate issues going on in Google webmaster tools (I could have been reading it wrong.) It looked like WMT was saying I had 2 versions of some of pages...it looked like pages that ended in a '/' ranking differently than pages that have no slash at the end. So I downloaded the redirect plugin and redirected many non / pages to the page that end with the "/". This was probably a mistake. but I'm trying to clean all of that up. (I'm also noticing that SEOMoz tools tells me my site has many, many redirected url's. I'm not sure why. I was looking at http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/pages?site=noahsdad.com%2F this morning at my top pages and it shows 2 versions (one being redirected) of the page about my son who was born with Down syndrome. (Noahsdad.com/story and Noahsdad.com/story/) I don't know if I've built rankings for those pages separately and it would now hurt me if I did away with the redirect. I'm not sure why I did the redirects (I must have read something online somewhere.) I'm wondering if someone wouldn't mind looking at the report and letting me know what the best way to 'clean' this stuff up...Should I go into the redirect software and delete all of the redirects where the non / page is being redirected to the / page? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | NoahsDad0