Rel=Canonical, WWW vs non WWW and SEO
-
Okay so I'm a bit of a loss here. For what ever reason just about every single Wordpress site I has will turn www.mysite.com into mysite.com in the browser bar. I assume this is the rel=canonical tag at work, there are no 301s on my site.
When I use the Open Site Explorer and type in www.mysite.com it shows a domain authority of around 40 and a few hundred backlinks... and then I get the message.
Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to XXXXXX. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>?
So if I click to see this data instead I have less than half of that domain authority and about 2 backlinks.
*** Does this make a difference SEO wise? Should my non WWW be redirecting to my WWW instead because that's where the domain authority and backlinks are?
Why am I getting two different domain authority and backlink counts if they are essentially the same? Or am I wrong and all that link juice and authority passes just the same?
-
Some browsers might hide the www and htttp part from the url . Just to make sure pop your sites url in there ( http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php ) and see if there is a redirect.
Rel canonical : does NOT redirect the pages .. its just there for search engine bots. Think of it this way
You would want to use rel canonical where you need to show the duplicate pages for users .. eg : on a shopping website sort by A-Z , by Price , Z-A, etc could all display the same things in different order BUT users benefits from having those so use a rel canonical there to tell the spider its all the same version of your " original page " . There is no redirects here users can see all the multiple versions of the page. If they are redirected what is the use of sorting those results ?
I would also like to know why OSE does that ( some one from the staff could possibly answer that )
In regards to your question : Should my non WWW be redirecting to my WWW ?
You should only allow one version it can either be non WWW or WWW. In your case stick with the one that has more authority and do a 301 redirect for the other one.
In regards to your question : Why am I getting two different domain authority and backlink counts ?
For Google www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com are 2 different sites on the same domain.
Hope that made things more clear for you
-
Okay... two main points I think here
- Yes, which domain/sub-domain the links are pointing to makes a difference - so if you have a www version and your links point to the non-www version then it's not quite as great. (Still has value for your site, though, it's important to remember). So you need to decide which is the most important and keep the canonicalisation (is that a word?) consistent throughout.
- In Wordpress you should be able to change the direction of the redirect, have a shuffle around the 'settings' section and you should be able to find it.
Hope this is helpful.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should summary pages have the rel canonical set to the full article?
My site has tons of summary pages, Whether for a PDF download, a landing page or for an article. There is a summary page, that explains the asset and contains a link to the actual asset. My question is that if the summary page is just summary of an article with a "click here to read full article" button, Should I set the rel canonical on the summary page to go to the full article? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Autoboof0 -
Invert canonicals?
Hi, We have 2 sites, site A and site B. For now, some of our articles are duplicated on site B with rel canonicals towards site A. Starting now, Site B will be the main site for this category, we'll only post the content on this site. We will keep the old content on site A. But what do you think will happen if we invert the canonicals for the old articles? They would go towards site B. Would google eventually update its index, a bit like it would do for a redirect? Thanks !
Technical SEO | | AdrienLargus0 -
Duplicate content and rel canonicals?
Hi. I have a question relating to 2 sites that I manage with regards to duplicate content. These are 2 separate companies but the content is off a data base from the one(in other words the same). In terms of the rel canonical, how would we do this so that google does not penalise either site but can also have the content to crawl for both or is this just a dream?
Technical SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Need Help With WWW vs. Non-WWW Duplicate Pages
A friend I'm working with at RedChairMarket.com is having duplicate page issues. Among them, both www and non-www URLs are being generated automatically by his software framework, ASP.net mvc 3. How should we go about finding and tackling these duplicates? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrittanyHighland0 -
Rel="canonical"
HI, I have site named www.cufflinksman.com related to Cufflinks. I have also install WordPress in sub domain blog.cufflinksman.com. I am getting issue of duplicate content a site and blog have same categories but content different. Now I would like to rel="canonical" blog categories to site categories. http://www.cufflinksman.com/shop-cufflinks-by-hobbies-interests-movies-superhero-cufflinks.html http://blog.cufflinksman.com/category/superhero-cufflinks-2/ Is possible and also have any problem with Google with this trick?
Technical SEO | | cufflinksman0 -
Campaign Issue: Rel Canonical - Does this mean it should be "on" or "off?"
Hello, somewhat new to the finer details of SEO - I know what canonical tags are, but I am confused by how SEOmoz identifies the issue in campaigns. I run a site on a wordpress foundation, and I have turned on the option for "canonical URLs" in the All in one SEO plugin. I did this because in all cases, our content is original and not duplicated from elsewhere. SEOmoz has identified every one of my pages with this issue, but the explanation of the status simply states that canonical tags "indicate to search engines which URL should be seen as the original." So, it seems to me that if I turn this OFF on my site, I turn off the notice from SEOmoz, but do not have canonical tags on my site. Which way should I be doing this? THANK YOU.
Technical SEO | | mrbradleyferguson0 -
Www & non-www URL Issue
Hi is there any tools out there which can enable me to find pages which both serve www and non-www versions of each URL
Technical SEO | | monster990 -
Will rel canonical tags remove previously indexed URLs?
Hello, 7 days ago, we implemented canonical tags to resolve duplicate content issues that had been caused by URL parameters. These "duplicate content" had already been indexed. Now that the URLs have rel canonical tags in place, will Google automatically remove from its index the other URLs with the URL parameters? I ask because we have been tracking the approximate number of URLs indexed by doing a site: search in Google, and we have barely noticed a decrease in URLs indexed. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | yacpro130