Rel=Canonical, WWW vs non WWW and SEO

[twilightofidols]

Okay so I'm a bit of a loss here.  For what ever reason just about every single Wordpress site I has will turn www.mysite.com into mysite.com in the browser bar.  I assume this is the rel=canonical tag at work, there are no 301s on my site.

When I use the Open Site Explorer and type in www.mysite.com it shows a domain authority of around 40 and a few hundred backlinks... and then I get the message.

Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to XXXXXX. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>?

So if I click to see this data instead I have less than half of that domain authority and about 2 backlinks.

*** Does this make a difference SEO wise?  Should my non WWW be redirecting to my WWW instead because that's where the domain authority and backlinks are?

Why am I getting two different domain authority and backlink counts if they are essentially the same?  Or am I wrong and all that link juice and authority passes just the same?

[Saijo.George]

Some browsers might hide the www and htttp part from the url . Just to make sure pop your sites url in there ( http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php ) and see if there is a redirect.

Rel canonical : does NOT redirect the pages .. its just there for search engine bots. Think of it this way

You would want to use rel canonical where you need to show the duplicate pages for users .. eg : on a shopping website sort by A-Z , by Price , Z-A, etc could all display the same things in different order BUT users benefits from having those so use a rel canonical there to tell the spider its all the same version of your " original page " . There is no redirects here users can see all the multiple versions of the page. If they are redirected what is the use of sorting those results ?

I would also like to know why OSE does that ( some one from the staff could possibly answer that )

In regards to your question : Should my non WWW be redirecting to my WWW ?

You should only allow one version it can either be non WWW or WWW. In your case stick with the one that has more authority and do a 301 redirect for the other one.

In regards to your question : Why am I getting two different domain authority and backlink counts ?

For Google  www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com are 2 different sites on the same domain.

Hope that made things more clear for you

[Nobody1560986989723]

Okay... two main points I think here

1. Yes, which domain/sub-domain the links are pointing to makes a difference - so if you have a www version and your links point to the non-www version then it's not quite as great. (Still has value for your site, though, it's important to remember). So you need to decide which is the most important and keep the canonicalisation (is that a word?) consistent throughout.
2. In Wordpress you should be able to change the direction of the redirect, have a shuffle around the 'settings' section and you should be able to find it.

Hope this is helpful.