Confusion over canonical links and 302 redirect

[wildlettuce]

Hello all! For the longest time, I was number one one google's for several keywords, wild lettuce being the main one, my site is www.wildlettuce.com. So anyhow, I went into business with someone for a while and the programmer did not take into consideration any of the link juice or cred I built up with google. He built a whole new site, but didn't keep any of the old link structure. He also did some redirect stuff. I didn't know the dangers of doing this back then, and thus I am currently being crushed. I eventually got rid of the site and built something myself with the kind of structure I want, but I linger around page four of google.

So, here's the question. There is a 302 redirect in place which sends the user to the non www. version of the site. I read that this is really bad for SEO and want to change it back to the direct www. Here's the problem, it' already been a few years and google has me indexed now without the www. I still have a bunch of links out there that could be giving me juice. I don't really understand how the juice is lost, or what will happen if I have it switched back to the www. version, or if I use a 301. 

Any advice or help out there for a floundering fallen star? I have the next strategy brewing, regarding lots of high quality content. I want to make sure the basic architecture is running the way it should before I set it all up. I use prestashop 1.6, for the online shop, by the way. I see in the backend where all of this stuff is manipulated, but I don't know really what t means for SEO.

Thanks!
C.

Edited October 10, 2015 by wildlettuce (see edit history)

[innovacy]

The search engine doesn't really care if www or not. 

 

If you want to take the most of link juice, use a 301 redirect which signals a permanent redirect. This is the proper code when moving sites to a new URL. 

 

Also, you can use a canonical URL meta tag to give google the signal, that another URL is the real URL for a page. This is good in cases like allowing your site to run both under www and without www or if for another reason different URLs work for your site for the same content. Also in cases, when you would switch from non-seo to seo url's. One strategy can be to leave both sites for some time with the new URL as the canonical URL online and after a while use only a redirect for the old page (more effort though and not many do that, but some think that keeps more of the link juice, which is questionable though).

 

There are other things to consider too, like if you have more than one language on the store. Pages can be signalled to google, that they are actually the same page only in another language. This can be beneficial. However, if things are not done right, some things could backfire.

 

That said, if you don't really have knowledge and experience in this sector, consider hiring an expert, which even can do more for you than just taking care of URLs, by checking other seo-relevant technical details of your site (besides SEO optimizations in regard of content). What you need here is the newest information. Infos found in forums or sites are quickly outdated regarding SEO as changes happen sometimes in short time. You need someone who works frequently with these things.