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
-
How to treat pages that are removed?
I have a website that need be very up-to-date, I mean, pages can be published just for 30 days, after that it should be unpublished. Everyday more than 300 pages is "removed", For theses pages I am returning http code "410" (Gone), also I remove from the sitemap. Now, I am checking Google WebMasterTools and I am getting thousands of pages not found. So... My questions Does it have SEO impact? How is the best approach to treat it?
On-Page Optimization | | thobryan0 -
How is this page ranking?
Hi. A client of mine is being outranked by a competitor whose landing page does not include the keyword within their page content AT ALL. Nor does their URL. Nor do any image alts. And their page title features the keyword in the middle of it, not at the start. Their link profile is not great with directories and the like. They are not socially active.. I am confused! I thought content on a page absolutely had to include the keyword to get ranked for it. Here's the page: www.springsoft.ie, keyword is "water softeners" Any thoughts I would appreciate. Many thanks.Christoffa
On-Page Optimization | | Christoffa0 -
Issue: Rel Canonical
My SEO Report shows issues: Rel Canonical I have a wordpress website each page has its content but I'm getting errors from my SEOMOZ report. I instaledl the yoast plug in to fix the issue but I'm still getting 29 errors. Wordpress 3.4.1
On-Page Optimization | | mobiledudes0 -
URL for location pages
Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
The pages will have all of this info in it's content
BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!0 -
How do I do a 301 Redirect in IIS 7 from http://www.freightmonster.com/index.html to http://freightmonster.com/index.html when I don't have a physical page to redirect?
I'm trying to get rid of my Rel Canonical links and use the 301 Redirect instead.
On-Page Optimization | | FreightBoy0 -
2 canonical tags on the same page
When using the 'on-page optimizer' tool, I continue to get the same recommendation on every page to only use 1 canonical tag on the page. I'm not sure why there are 2 tags on each page in the first place so I don't know how to remove the one that's not needed. Our site is on a WP blog and a sample page to view the source code would be: http://www.shilohstreet.com/blog/is-flipping-houses-smart-real-estate-investing.html Does anyone know why this is happening, how to fix it and/or if I should even be concerned with it? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | shilohstreet0 -
Google is indexing spam pages from my site. What is the most effective way to get ride of the search results? Pages are deleted now but should I do something more?
A long time ago I created a forum (Invision Power Board) and it got full of spam. Massive amounts! /forum/ I've now deleted the forum but the spam pages are still indexed on Google. Can I do something else to hurry up the process to get ride of them?
On-Page Optimization | | ocarlsson0 -
Spammy keywords on a page
My client's website has a box of text on each page that is spammy and horrible to read and stuffed with keywords. The text boxes are there only for search engines as they mean nothing to humans. I say remove them as it must be doing more harm than good. However, my client is scared to remove them as the text has been there on each page for ten years and he is worried about a drop in visitor numbers if they are removed. Is he right to be worried?
On-Page Optimization | | mascotmike0