Will implementing 301's on an existing domain impact massively on rankings?
-
Hi Guys,I have a new SEO client who only has the non-www domain setup for GWT and I am wondering if implementing a 301 for www will have a massive negative impact on rankings. I know a percentage of link juice and PageRank will be affected. So my question is:
If I implement the 301 should I brace myself for a fall in rankings. Should I use a 301 instead to maintain link juice and PageRank?
Is it good practice to forward to www? Or could I leave the non www in place and have the www redirect to it to maintain the data?
Dave
-
Hi Folks,
Cheers for the feedback but there seems to be a lack of a consensus on the actual effects a 301 will have.
I am well aware of the impacts of not having a nominated preferred domain and its not the question I was asking about. As mentioned above this is an inherited issue, I would never let a site go live without having the preferred domain set along with a host of other settings.
In relation to the last question I was trying to assess if there is a "standard" in using the www. subdomain. As in is this in Googles guidelines or is it a strong suggestion to have www.<yourdomain>.com as the destination address instead of <youdomain>.com?</youdomain></yourdomain>
Dave
-
It doesn't matter whether you use WWW or non-WWW, but what matters is to use only ONE of them, and redirect the other to the one that you are using. Even if you may face a slight fall in rankings, you will want to consolidate your SEO juice in one domain, which will beneficial in the long run.
-
There should be no impact, you are following the best practices and guidelines. And I agree, you want to have it in place.
-
301ing non www to www or vice versa is best practice to prevent / minimize duplicate content. You want to have it in place.
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
-
Backlink from same domain but different subdomain? any juice here?
will i be able to get the link juice from the same domain but different subdomain, if I have a backlink lets say there is a website, which is featuring my topic on multiple subdomains any benefit? or it will be considered one link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maria-cooper90 -
Is it possible that my Da and Pa will be high and i’m still not ranking?
what would be those reasons ? factors that im not ranking? what bad seo practices to steer clear? need an anwer in depth i would really appreciate the answers Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | calvinkj0 -
Image redirection: Will it helps or hurts?
Hi all, There are some old images (non-existing now) from our website which have backlinks. We would like to redirect them to some live images to reclaim the backlinks. Is this Okay or sounds suspicious to Google? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Should I 301 redirect my old site are just add a link to my new site
I used to offer design and web services on a site that is current blank (no content, no links). My questions is should I add a little bit of content, maybe a brief explanation with a link to my new site. Or should I just add 301 redirect. This is purely a question of what is better for SEO and ranking for my new site (not a branding question).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tyrell0 -
Google says 404s don't cause ranking drops, but what about a lot of them
Hello, According to Google here, 404s don't cause rankings to go down. Our rankings are going down and we have about 50 or so 404s (though some may have been deindexed by now). We have about 300 main products and 9000 pages in general on this Ecommerce site. There's no link equity gained by 301 redirecting the 404s. A custom 404 page has been made linking to the home page. There's nothing linking to the pages that are 404s Provided that no more 404s are created, can I just ignore them and find the real reason our rankings are going down?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Why won't my home page rank for branded terms?
Hello, I've been trying to figure out what factors are causing my home page not to rank for my branded terms. The site is www.lipozene.com and after the late April Google algorithm our rankings have disappeared off the map for the term "lipozene". Different element of the site show up in organic rankings, including our shopping cart (http://shop.lipozene.com) as high as page two. However, the home page is not ranking organically. On Yahoo & Bing we have never dropped out of the number 1 spot. We did engage in some link building activities, however we've removed nearly all of the links that were created by our SEO guy. I did NOT receive any notifications from Google regarding their link policy. If you search for lipozene.com we rank #1. Any thoughts on what we're missing thats causing us to not rank is greatly apprecaited. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lipoweb0 -
Dramatic fall in SERP's for all keywords at end of March 2012?? Help!
Hi, Our website www.photoworld.co.uk has been improving it's SERP's for the last 12 months or so, achieving page 1 rankings for most of our key terms. Then suddenly, around the end of March, we suffered massive drops in nearly all of our key terms (see attached image for more info). Basically I wondered if anyone had any clues on what Google has suddenly taken a huge dislike to with our site and steps we can put in place to aid with rankings recovery ASAP. Thanks n8taO.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cewe0 -
Massive rank drop for 'unnatural links' . Help!
Hi Everyone, I work for a company called Danbro - www.danbro.co.uk Recently a massive penalty lead to a huge drop across all keywords in Google including the brand name. Since we have conducted a massive clean up; (requesting competitors to remove duplicate content, removing some poor quality links etc etc) We still have not seen any improvement whatsoever nor has Google responded. Has anyone ever received a positive response from Google? Since we sent a reconsideration request our ranks actually went worse!! Any advice would be great
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Townpages0