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Redirects affect on page and domain authority
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Hi - excuse me if this is stupid question but I'm rather new to this. Currently the PA for the home page is 16 and the DA 28 and I have some concerns that my efforts are being diluted.
When I use OSE on www.sassandgrace.co.uk I get different link results to sassandgrace.co.uk but there is a redirect in place to sassandgrace.co.uk and cannot run a crawl report, for example, on www.sassandgrace.co.uk. The PA and DA are identical for each but the number of links different
With a smallish number of links pointing to each but with a redirect in place, am I losing some of the effect or is having the redirect in place giving me all the credit for links to both addresses?
Thanks
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Redirects usually don't pass all link juice to the target URL but may in time. You won't get accurate reports on the www version of your site because it's redirecting to the non-www URL, so use this primary URL when running reports with SEO tools. Regarding the number of links, you may find that people generally link to the www version just by habit, and that's why I personally still use this as my primary for most projects.
Another thing to do is check Google WMT to make sure both www and non-www properties are listed. You'll then be able to select the preferred domain in site settings.
You didn't ask but I'd strongly suggest you go over some PageSpeed and YSlow recommendation. It's very slow and JS heavy, and this is simply bad for all the reasons you already know.
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The 301 redirect indicates that a web page has been moved from point A to point B, and tells the search engines that this page “moved permanently”. It also tells the search engines that all of the attendant qualities of the original page should be assigned to the new page. This includes PageRank, page authority, traffic values, and active link information.
Webmasters should use the 301 redirect if they have changed domains, or have launched their site on a new content management system with a new URL structure. A 301 redirect will tell the search engines to direct all ranking and value signals to the new URL, and that the new URL is now permanent.
Another important note and use of a 301 is in the canonicalization of your domain. I know, big word. But, all it means is that you pick either the www or non-www version of your site and make sure to 301 to the other.
This avoids duplicate content issues/penalties with Google’s Panda algorithm. Also, if your site is using a SSL certificate, it’s important to use page sculpting of the HTTPS and HTTP versions of your site’s pages.
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