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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Understanding why our new page doesn't rank. Internal link structure to blame? + understand canonical pages more.
Hi guys. Sorry it's an essay...BUT, i think a lot of you will find this an interesting question. This question is in 2 (related) parts, and I imagine it would be an 'advanced' SEO question. Hoping you guys can help bring some real insight 🙂 Always amazed at the quality for this forum/ community. **Context... ** We had a duplicate content issue caused by this page and it's product permutations, so we placed canonical tags on all the product permutations to solve it. Worked a treat. However, we now have more **product ranges. **We now sell Diaries, Notebooks & Music books, which are clearly different from one another. So...we've placed canonical tags on all the product permutations leading back to the 'parent' theme. In other words, all the diary permutations 'lead back' to the diary page. All the notebooks permutations 'lead back' to the main notebook page. So on and so forth. Make sense so far? Context end..... Issue. Amazingly our Diary page outranks our notebook pagefor the search term 'Design your own Notebook'. The notebook page is well optimised for this search term, and the diary page avoids the word 'notebook' altogether (so no keyword cannibalisation going on). Possible reason? Our Diary page has a vast amount of internal links to it throughout our site. The notebook page has only a few. Could this be the issue? If so, what reading/ blogs/ content/ tools would you recommend to help understand and solve this problem? i.e) Better understanding internal link structure for SEO. 2nd part of the question (in the context of internal linking for SEO). When there are internal links to a page with a conical tag does that 'count' towards the 'parent page', or simply towards that specific page? I really hope that makes sense. If it's clear as mud just shout. Isaac. EDIT: All pages in question have been indexed since we added these changes to the site.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Will pushing a visitor to a conversion page hosted on a 3rd-party domain hurt the landing page ranking
Had an interesting question from a client. The client has a page that is optimized for a specific term. The goal of the page is to push users to sign-up for a trial. The trial registration (conversion) page is hosted by a third-party. Will pushing users to the conversion page cannibalize the SEO authority of the landing page. My reflexive answer is to say no, but now am not so sure.
On-Page Optimization | | infoblue0 -
Is there any decent web browser that still displays the full page title at the top of the page?
I just updated to the latest version of Firefox on my Mac and saw that they now hide most of the page title in the browser tab, like Chrome and Safari. I like to be able to see the full page title at all times (for reasons I'm sure you all understand) and that's pretty much the only reason I stuck with Firefox all these years. Now I'm looking for an alternative – any suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | matt-145671 -
How to do this 301 redirection
Hi there! I have two domains with the same content. Some guys in this forum posted that It would be convinient to do a 301 redirect from one ".com" domain to ".es" domain (my potential market). I just tried to set it up in the htaccess file but it dind't worked at all. Something like: redirect 301 http://wwww.domain.com http://www.domain.es I just configure in the webmaster tools the domain www.domain.com as preferred domain insted of http://domain.comThe same with the other domain. Any help? many thanks
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Why a page with an On Page A grade has a less good rank than a page with a F grade?
Why a page with an On Page A grade is ranked 17 in Google when the home page with a F grade is ranked 9 ? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Amadeus_eBC0 -
Source page leading to a 404 pages in reports
Hi everybody, I wonder how to find and quickly correct 404 errors in my crawl reports : SeoMoz says me "http://domain.com/this-page-is-dead" is 404, but I can't figure out a source page where a link to that url appears. I tried a google link:http://domain.com/this-page-is-dead request, with no more luck. I imagine the trick is trivial, but I need it 🙂 Moreover, why do not show a list of pages referring to this 404 page on reports ? Thanks, Loïc
On-Page Optimization | | mandinga0 -
Is On Page SEO Dead?
Hey Guys, Search Engine Roundtable has published a short post about this a few days ago, quoting senior member at WebmasterWorld forums who said: "The way I see it, on-page text today is for the "relevance" part of the total algorithm. The whole algorithm is, in broad strokes, "relevance + connectedness + quality". After you've clearly stated the relevance of the page, then the rest of your ranking power comes from elsewhere. I've added on-page bold tags with no effect. I've added or changed h1 elements with no effect. Not too long ago, those might well have done something, but that's not the game anymore. And moving from a table layout to a CSS-P layout today might get you nowhere, too. It all depends how deeply complicated the table layout was, I think." http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4408395.htm Is it true? Is on-page SEO really dead? What do you think?
On-Page Optimization | | ShivaS0 -
How do I fix a 404 with a 301
I understand the need for fixing 404's but I have yet to have a serious walkthrough of how to set up a 301. From all the talk on the forums and such I'm pretty sure this is easy but I've just never done it before and I could really use a walk through. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | BenRWoodard1