How Much Does a Missing www. 301 redirect hurt a business?

[FlynnZaiger]

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.

[mediawyse]

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!

[FlynnZaiger]

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!