Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have a couple things I would like to clarify on 301's via this example:
A site currently has no redirect - google sees both widgets.com (PR 7) and www.widgets.com (PR 6).
It seems like this site should do a 301 redirect to widgets.com (the higher PR ranking).
Here are my questions:
1) Might this give the site an overall boost in PR?
2) What is the short-term effect of making this change (could it change your rankings and for how long)?
3) Is www. better than non-www?
Also, if you recently made this change yourself - how did it go? Thanks for your help!
www or non-www depends on the users you are focused on. www is very common, people can get confused if you have a domain without.
>> 1) Might this give the site an overall boost in PR?
Yes, you basically consolidate two "sites" into one. Don't expect a significant change though.
>> 2) What is the short-term effect of making this change
>> (could it change your rankings and for how long)?
As for "how long" it's permanent. It will most likely change your rankings positively as you no longer "split" your site across two sets of URLs, hence each URL will get more link power.
As for "short term" don't expect any results the first four to six weeks. You might see improvement before that, but don't expect everything to be fixed in the SE before that. It takes time.
>> 3) Is www. better than non-www?
There's absolutely no difference for the SE's.
For the users, I'd personally argue that "www." is just an annoyance (four more characters to type) but others have other views.
In your case, as the non-www domain has the higher PR I'd advice you to select that one. Apparently more people link to the non-www version already, so if you pick that one you minimize the risk of problems.
Apache/2.0.46 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.46 OpenSSL/0.9.6b PHP/4.3.2 Server at www.domain.com Port 80
If the URL shown in the 404 page includes the www, then redirect to that. If it does not include the www then redirect to the non-www version instead.
If you want to use the other one, opposite to what is listed, then you must change the server alias setting in httpd.conf to reflect what you want to do, as well as setting up the redirect itself. If you don't then you will end up with a lot of problems.
If your server default is www.domain.com (as shown on the 404 page), but you want to use the non-www version instead, then this is what can happen if you fail to also edit the server configuration:
If you have a link to domain.com/folder (without trailing / on it) then the server will automatically redirect to www.domain.com/folder/ (the server default) before the 301 redirect kicks in to redirect you to the domain.com/folder/ that you wanted.
This can sometimes lead to all of your pages still continuing to be duplicate listed. The symptom is easy to spot if you use Xenu LinkSleuth and use it to generate a sitemap. You will see that the sitmap contains twice as many pages as you expected (twice as many as really exist), and that half of the listed pages have a title of 301 Moved.
If you link directly to domain.com/folder/ then no redirection takes place, and this does not occur. One careless link without a trailing / will be enough to start it going wrong. Don't rely on exactly correct linking within and to your pages, instead set the server alias to exactly match what you are redirecting to.
Thanks for your help!
Did anyone understand my post?
>> 1) Might this give the site an overall boost in PR?Yes, you basically consolidate two "sites" into one.
I would rather say: two sets of inbound links into one.
Did anyone understand my post?
I did. And although it's a mechanism I knew of, I did not think about it in this context. Well spotted, I should say!
They will if you use a 301 redirect from all of the non-www to the matching www pages.
That is one of the (at least four that I can think of) reasons for doing the redirect.
It's a great benefit to set up your server with the right default hostname when you do this stuff (or to have your host do it for you). Anything that can minimize the risk of errors is a good thing to do.
Before:
site.com = PR2
www.site.com = PR3
After the redirect...
www.site.com = PR4
site.com = PR0
It seems as though you still get credit for the IBL pointing to site.com. Clear as mud?
To avoid the "friendly error page" (so graciously provided by MSIE) that obscures the vital server response, use a non-IE browser to do this test, or dig into the IE advanced options and turn the "Show friendly HTTP eror messages" option off. You'll also have to temporarily disable any custom 404 error page you may have in order to see the default server response containing the server name.
Jim
In my experience... the site's PR was split between the two version (www and non-www). This is what clued me in that I had a problem. When I put them together, PR went up for example:
Before:site.com = PR2
www.site.com = PR3After the redirect...
www.site.com = PR4
site.com = PR0
Billy, how long was your 301 in effect when this happened? It my case, this did not happen. After doing a 301, my www and non-www versions still have the same PR (www still being 1pt higher).
Thanks loads in eagerly waited anticipation! Seen it the other way around but cant get that working...
Billy, how long was your 301 in effect when this happened? It my case, this did not happen. After doing a 301, my www and non-www versions still have the same PR (www still being 1pt higher).
Two PR update cycles. I'm not sure the 301 was recognized by Google during the first toolbar PR update. By the second toolbar update, the PR was "fixed."
You are providing "duplicate content" and there are many reasons why that is bad.
Two PR update cycles. I'm not sure the 301 was recognized by Google during the first toolbar PR update. By the second toolbar update, the PR was "fixed."
So how much time is that exactly? ;) Weeks, or months?
Thanks.
Some effects can sometimes be seen in two to three weeks.
I'm doing a 301 redirect from the "www", and my 404 page shows without the "www".
My home page was PR5, now it's PR4. An internal page that used to be PR6 is now PR3...
Bear in mind this is an "old line" site that was around before google. It doesn't have scads of content, but I've got a few yahoo and dmoz links, links from a well-known computer manufacturer, links from .edu sites, etc. Not much link growth recently, however.
One unrelated problem could be because I used to host another blog in a directory off the domain, and I moved that to a new domain and 301ed all those pages. That had a lot of inbound links, but none of them had anything to do with or linked to the PR6 page in any way. Another might be because I linked to some of my newer sites from the main page of the old site. But, one of those has PR consistent with the old site's PR.
Could this just be a temporary glitch?
