301 redirect dropped page rank

[adriot]

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

[ShaMenz]

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

[adriot]

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!

[ShaMenz]

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

[adriot]

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!

[waynekolenchuk]

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.