Will our PA be retained after URL updates?

[Towelsrus]

Our web hosting company recently applied a seo update to our site to deal with canonicalization issues and also rewrote all urls to lower case. As a result our PA is now 1 on all pages its effected. I took this up with them and they had this to say.

"I must confess I’m still a bit lost however can assure you our consolidation tech uses a 301 permanent redirect for transfers. This should ensure any back link equity isn’t lost.

For instance this address: http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels-bath-sheets/aztex/egyptian-cotton-Bath-sheet_ct474bd182pd2731.htm

Redirects to this page: http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels-bath-sheets/aztex/egyptian-cotton-bath-sheet_ct474bd182pd2731.htm

And the redirect returns 301 header response – as discussed in your attached forum thread extract"

Firstly, is canonicalization working as the number of duplicate pages shot up last week and also will we get our PA back?

Thanks

Craig

[AndreVanKets]

Sorting out the canonicalisation was a good move, and generally url's with lower case characters are the best practices, but there is no negative SEO involved with letters in Caps in the URL. (lets hope the PA wasn't to high, as the new URL's are essentially new pages)

The link juice will flow via the redirect, but i dont think Open Site Explorer will follow the redirect as a link that contrbutes to PA.

Perhaps ask your SEO to change the URL's on links that have been built to these pages. This will definitely bring your PA for these pages back up. '

Greg

[Towelsrus]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for your reply. So in a nutshell we just need to get back links updated use the new URL's in order to pull back PA we had previously?

Regards

Craig