301 redirect dropped page rank
-
Hi,
We have a www domain that I have changed to a non www domain. The www domain had been in place for some time and had a good page rank, PR4.
After this change the page rank dropped significantly (PR0, and now recently back to PR2) despite it being a 301 redirect which I thought "should" carry over the page rank.
Yes, I am aware I should have just left it be. Hind sight 20/20 .. ya ya ya
My questions
- Is the 301 the correct method for this?
- Why did the page rank drop despite the 301?
- Should we go back to the www domain at this point?
Thanks
Kris
-
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
-
Hi Sha,
Thanks for your reply!
I checked in to the visits on the site as they have remained fairly consistent from the months prior. I understand the PR toolbar is not updated regularly, and that PR has limited value in the grand scheme of things. My concern is largely on the PR as is the most visible factor at the moment, based on that the 301 redirect "should" have maintained most(?) of the PR with out disruption.
It is just very odd that this would happen with in days of the change, the content has not changed drastically.... this is going to sound like a stretch but, is it possible Google has attributed my root domain against the sub-domain as duplicate content in it's cache regardless of the 301 redirect?
I am just trying to understand the problem, if it really is one, and if there is any good solutions apart from just waiting it out and rebuilding on what we currently have in place now. Everything I have changed was in accordance to the way it "should" be according to Google and the internet at large...
Thanks!
-
Hi Kris,
An alarm bell rang for me when you mentioned that your focus here is on the effect upon PageRank. You should be very careful in attributing the change in Pagerank to the implementation of the 301 as Toolbar PageRank is updated infrequently and in a very ad hoc fashion. This means that there may have been other things which occurred over the period between PageRank updates which were responsible for the change.
Rand gave a very good explanation of the vagaries of PageRank and the differences between the two types of PageRank in this Whiteboard Friday recently - What is Google's PageRank Good For?
Given the changes that have occurred recently in the world of search, I would be looking fairly carefully at the possibility that some of those changes may be responsible for any negative impacts on the site. Also, has there been a negative impact on traffic and/or rankings? These things are really much more important than PR.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Hi Wayne,
I am currently using mod_rewrite to rewrite the sub-domain to the root domain. Is the 301 not a permanent redirect?
Also mod_rewrite can pass a header(301) with the redirect of the domain, which from what I understand "should" have told Google, etc.. that the site is now moved permanently.
What header should be used for the redirect?Prior to me changing the www domain to a non www domain it was reversed and going the other direction... non www domain redirect to the www domain.
Rearding the Canonicalitzation, I have additional rewrite rules to combat duplicate content issues such as index.php rewritten to / and so on and so forth... as well as the sub-domain to root domain rewrites
Thanks!
-
You may be suffering from Canonicalitzation. There's a post about it here http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
You should use mod rewrite to redirect a subdomain to the root domain, not 301. I would remove the 301 and with time your position should be restored.
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
-
Ranking Drop
hey guys, I know there is always someone here asking this questions, but I have done my fair share of investigation and have not come up with a cause. my ranking dropped from page one to page 2 or 3 last sunday in time span of 4 hours. After that I read that google was updating panda with 4.1, but don't know why I got hit exactly. my competition is all clear and some have even gained rankings, and mine dropped even though my domain and page authority increased as well. any ideas would help. I already checked all the obvious ones (such as spam, links, content, etc)
Technical SEO | | s-s1 -
Importance of 301 Redirects
Hello, I have been brought in at the last minute to consult for an e-commerce client who is about to relaunch their website. The site currently receives 8000 visits a month, 3100 of which are from organic search. They have a few thousand product pages. The web development firm they are using is changing all of the old product page urls and using 'search engine friendly' urls for the new site, which is expected to launch in a few weeks. However, they did not/are not planning on including 301 redirects from the old URLs. Other than simply stating 'this will be bad for your SEO', what would be a correct way of explaining to the client how much of a problem it will be if their new site launches without 301s. For example, is this a big enough issue to delay the launch of the site / get in a contract dispute with the web developer?
Technical SEO | | stageagent0 -
Sudden drop in ranking google.co.uk ranking
Anyone else had any sudden drops in rankings this week? Is there an update going on? One of my primary keywords has dropped from 6th to 49th in the google.co.uk search results. Not in webmaster tools to flag an issue. I have downloaded the links from webmaster and it does look if some content has been scraped and then linked back to us from a large number of sites that we have never sort links from. I have upload the google disavow link tool. Only one keyword appears to be effected not all of them? Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
Rankings Dropped Dramatically
Hi All, I need some advice on this one, one of our websites is performing very badly and I am lost to know why. We migrated from an old website www.myclient.co.uk and re-directed to www.myclient.com. The issue we had was that the old site relied on search results i.e. www.myclient.co.uk/search+villas+in+marbella However most ranked url's were not as tidy as the example above and had lots of characters. Because of this and the fact that all incoming links were to the homepage we do not carry out any 301 re-directs. In some keywords we have increased our rankings but for others we have dropped dramatically. keyword 1 4th Jan position 22 9th Jan position 90 keyword 2 4th jan position 34 9th jan position 89 keyword 3 4th jan position 12 9th jan position 16 (a smaller drop than the others) We do have some top 10s for this domain so I don't think we have been penalised for anything but I am shocked to see such drops in rankings. I have setup the website so that each page targets different keywords and I have checked and they get A grades within SEOmoz. Any advice would be really appreciated, as the client is not too happy at the moment. Many thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | iprosoftware0 -
Canonical tag, CNAME and 301 redirect
I have a website with a couple of domains pointing to one IP address. Let's say I have two domains www.example.com and www.example.ca I also see during my SEO analysis that the example.com and the www.example.com (same for the example.ca and the www.example.ca) are triggering server responses. How do I deal with this issue for best SEO. Canonical links? CNAME, or 301 redirects? thanks
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
What pages of my site does Google rank as the most important?
If I type site:youtube.com into Google, are the results listed by what Google considers to be the most important pages of the site? If I change my sitemap should this order change? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Seaward-Group0 -
Rel canonical or 301 the Index Page?
Still a bit confused on best practice for /index.php showing up as duplicate for www.mysite.com. What do I need to do and How?
Technical SEO | | bozzie3110