301, Canonical, and Page Authority

[Highline_Ideas]

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.

[LynnPatchett]

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.

[Highline_Ideas]

Great! Thank you for clarifying that!

[JarnoNijzing]

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

[Highline_Ideas]

Jarno,

Thank you for the answer. Great insight!! I appreciate your help with this issue.