Questions
-
301 redirect dropped page rank
Hi Kris, Google's public position on the use of 301 redirects is that it will preserve almost all of the link juice from the old page and pass it to the new. This Google webmaster video from Matt Cutts was uploaded in April of this year and is fairly clear on that. However, we need to remember that PageRank is basically a measure of the number and quality of links to your site. There is a detailed explanation here. So, it may be that there has been some change in the the sites that link to yours between PR updates. You can use SEOmoz tools to conduct a little CSI on the sites and check this if you want to. First, find the sites that are linking to yours in Open Site Explorer. Export the Report to csv to grab the list of sites and open it up in Excel. You can then use the SEOmoz Historical PageRank Tool to check whether there has been any significant change in the PR of the sites linking to you. If you find some, there is your answer. If you do not find any significant changes...then perhaps the reversal of the redirect has triggered some of that recalculation described in the PR article -and since it is coming back... On the subject of there being some mis-match issue in Google's Index between the non www root domain and the www subdomain, there is one thing that occurs to me. Is it possible that you have changed the 301 redirect, but still have an instruction existing in Google Webmaster Tools which is telling Google that your primary domain is the www? This could create some confusion for Googlebot and perhaps influence Google's view of how "friendly" your site is. It shouldn't really affect PageRank, but could affect rankings. Since it hasn't made any difference to your traffic, I would not be too worried, but would probably take a look at the link profile and see if there is a need to work on attracting more or better links for the site. Hope that helps, Sha
Technical SEO Issues | | ShaMenz0