Prefered Domain

[liondedan]

Hello,

I'm looking for a little bit of help related to url canonicalization. I want my site to accessed through the non-www version, so to set this up via the google webmasters dashboard, I had to verify both sites to put this in place. I now have both accounts setup separately in the dash board (the www and the non-www). They are both showing different data, will they both eventually come together into the one I set as the preferred one? Also the page some of the pages I redirected where PR 3, I redirected them to a new non-www page with a new url but similar content, would it pass less link juice through if the www bit changed?

Hope that isn't too confused,

Thank you

[NathanielB]

Have you simply set a www to non-www redirect for a single domain or have you changed domains? If so and you have set your redirect code correctly it should be fine.

It sounds like you have changed your old urls as well as set the www to non-www redirect correct? If so this will take time to change in google as they need to crawl your site to pick up on the changes, but once done all should be fine (you may see a slight change in rankings, but nothing major from my experience).

Could I ask why you have changed your urls? And if you use to use the www as your preferred domain (if so why the change)?

[liondedan]

Thank you for your reply Nathaniel. It was a really old website that I recently (two weeks ago) completely revamped, the old urls where all over 10 words separated by + symbol. It looks spammy and didn't even fit in the address bar.

As far as the change of www, the site hadn't set a preferred one before so I simple choose the non-www randomly, The change has been in place for about two weeks, but I'm now wondering weather I should change back, because I didn't realise the non-www and www have different domain authorities etc.

[NathanielB]

Before you change to the www I would ask this questions first:

1. Does the www version have a lot more authority then the non-www?
2. Has google picked up on the preferred domain correctly and now started to change its index to show these changes?

IF the changes have already mostly taken effect and/or the two different variations don't have much of a difference in authority, I would leave it as you changed it to, but if googles not picked up the changes yet you could gamble with reversing the changes, but I don't know if this would have any kind of negative effect as I have always picked the best to start with and stuck with it.

For the old urls, did you make sure to 301 redirect each of them to there respective new url?

For your link juice question in the first post (forgot to answer it sorry), yes some link juice is passed with 301 redirects, but just how much is lost is unknown. Having said that, once google picks up on the changes you should be fine with rankings and authority etc being passed to the new url's' if you have setup your 301 redirects correctly.

Have you used .htaccess to do your redirects? Feel free to post your code if you would like others to have a look over it to check for any problems.