Switch to naked domain that has higher page authority

[kris-fannin]

Brilliant Moz community!

I just started here and find it so helpful and am confident that I can get an answer to this.

Our domain is currently https://www.example.com. I have been wanting to move to https://example.com just for a cleaner URL.

To my surprise, https://example.com has the same DA but a significantly higher page authority than our current https://www.example.com.

Of course my immediate reaction is to 301 to the https://example.com but I wanted to get some advice and anything we should consider before doing this.

My other question would be - how is this possible? I don't remember that we ever used that domain but we also had some rather bad developers a couple of years back.

Thank you so much in advance!

[RobCairns]

Hi Kris,

Yes PA will increase with a naked domain - Google has outlined that it enjoys seeing this and has directions on how to do it with Google Sites (Link Below):

https://support.google.com/a/answer/2518373?hl=en

Redirecting is a good move and can be done through your CMS - how you do this will depend on what you are using to operate your site. Keep in mind that redirects can affect the power of any links pointing to your Home Page and this will affect link juice flowing through the rest of your site to some degree. Depending on the scope of your service area and what kind of SEO you are running (Local, Global or PPC), this will have a greater or lesser impact on what you do moving forward.

In terms of what is creating the better PA - a combination of Google's approach to ranking sites and what your external links are pointing to are probably the answer. If external links are pointing to your naked domain instead of the www. version, this would explain what you are seeing.

Without knowing the site or the context it's hard to know for sure, but those are my guesses.

Hope this helps and fire any additional questions/info you want at me and I will try to help out as best I can.

Cheers,

Rob

[kris-fannin]

Rob,

Thank you for such a fantastic and thorough answer. Helped immensely. We are about to move our site to a new host so I am thinking of having them change it all at that point.

So just to confirm, we are going to be changing our canonical domain from https://www. to https://(no www).

I've run many links through the Pro tool and seem to have same or higher PA for each.

I am not sure why, but it seems a little scary to do this :). I think it is because of how much I read about NOT changing domains/URL structure.

Very appreciative!

Kris

[RobCairns]

My pleasure sir - glad to be of help!

Yea I remember running the naked switch (sounds naughty) for our site a while back and I was a bit jittery but since we are operating with an algorithm the best thing to remember is that you can always make adjustments as long as you are making "educated guesses" with the intent of moving in the right direction.

From what I'm hearing you shouldn't have any issues with the switch - with the canonical tags you are avoiding any chance of duplicate pages and the naked url will give you slightly bigger boosts on the PA side - terrific for local organic ranking and SEO.

The primary focus of not changing URL structure is to avoid getting your link juice bottled up somewhere in your site (or the dreaded repetitive internal linking cycles). Changing domains isn't a terrible idea as long as it's done properly. Sounds like you've got it in hand though so best of luck in moving forward!

All the best,

Rob

[kris-fannin]

Thank you, Rob! I'll let you know how it goes.