Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Multiple sites in the same niche
-
Hi All
A question regarding multiple sites in the same niche...
If I have say 10 sites all targetting the same niche yet all on different C-class IPs with different hosts, registrars, whois data and ages can I use the same template, or will Google discern a pattern?
Basically I have developed a WordPress template which I want to use on the sites albeit with different logos / brand colours.
NB/ All of the 10 sites will have unique, original content and they will NOT be interlinked
-
Thanks Keri, I have heard that when engaging in such nefarious practices webmaster tools should be avaoided like the plague!
-
Years ago, I was subcontracting and one of the web designer's clients refused 2-3 AdWords charges that totaled about $35. ALL of the Adwords accounts that I had were suspended without warning, even though they were different clients. I had everything in Google Webmaster Tools. They do look at these signals.
-
Indeed it is. I don't know how paranoid I really am about that stuff; but I guess I don't usually work in situations that would call for it.
I usually side with the crowd that says "come on, do you really think Google is researching and analyzing such distant aspects in an attempt to catch a spammer?"
But then again, if I were a search engine...I would indeed research stuff that most people don't think about. Especially if I had such the resources as held by Google. Just sayin'
My interest is kinda peaked though. Let me know what you do and how it works out.
-
Thanks for that Josh...good point about the sidebar content, heads and footers. They will hopefully appear to a user (as well as Google) totally unique. I guess paranoia is the name of the game...hence the question in the first place!!
-
This is a bit of a tricky one. If you're really able to keep them separated then you should be fine. After all, many people download the same WP themes from not only their repository, but from third-party places like themeforest.
Just to be safe though, I would really make sure they are different; regarding sidebar content, etc. I would also make some changes to the heads and footers. Not just the meta, but placement of code, inclusion/exclusion of pieces, etc. Really get in there and make sure.
Honestly though, I don't know what your niche/strategy is; but you're going to have your hands full promoting 10 sites of the same type. If this is an attempt to get them all to rank for the same searches, I would re-consider your strategy. Google is pretty good at figuring that stuff out, especially if a competitor points them in your direction. It can be difficult enough to promote just one site sometimes, let alone having to also worry about what flags you may be throwing up with each of 10 sites.
If you're still going to do it, I would be super paranoid about it. Log into Google Analytics from different computers, never speak about them to people, and each time you meet someone, give them a fake name. I'm certain Google's street view cameras are equipped with microphones to catch spammers on ground-level. But maybe I only think that because the aliens told me....and what do they know about SEO?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Breadcrumbs and multiple parent categories on Shopify site - what's the answer?
Hi Mozzers... I'm working on a Shopify site - it is polyhierarchical with multiple parent categories for each product. Not uncommon with Shopify because of issues with faceted nav on that platform. The problem is that defining ONE breadcrumb trail back to the homepage, it works against UX, as people will be wanting to go back to the previous search results, primarily, to revisit the parent category specific search (this is an ecommerce site with a huge number of products). So heaven knows what to do. I could do: (1) Home / Product to avoid the issue. Not very good for UX though as where is the previous category page (where more than likely a product search was carried out). (2) Home / Specific Previous Search Page - Parent Category / Product (if that is possible without upsetting SEO performance - I don't think it is - but any advice is welcome) (3) or I could define one specific path and also include: Return to Previous Page / Search as a separate clickback link outside of but adjacent to the breadcrumb trail (I think Macy's used to do that): https://baymard.com/blog/ecommerce-breadcrumbs The problem with defining a specific path is it flys in the face of UX in the context of this site! Although of course defining one path seems to be best practice for SEO. Any help would be gratefully received! Thanks a million, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LukeRow0 -
Site Migration - Pagination
Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 ** ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2 **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES0 -
Multiple Internal links to same destinations
My company is redoing our homepage and there will be 4 links to our main play pages (5 games). 2 in the menu and 2 within the content. I was thinking I should no follow one of the links on the homepage + 1 in the menu so that we don't have link dilution from having multiple internal links to the same destination within 1 page. Does this make sense? Any downside of this or suggestions of a solution that may be more effective? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Regional and Global Site
We have numerous versions of what is basically the same site, that targets different countries, such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa. These websites use Tlds to designate the region, for example, co.uk, co.za I believe this is sufficient (with a little help from Google Webmastertools) to convince the search engines what site is for what region. My question is how do we tell the search engines to send traffic from other regions besides the above to our global site, which would have a .com TLD. For example, we don't have a Brazilian site, how do we drive traffic from Brazil to our global .com site? Many thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0 -
Create new subdomain or new site for new Niche Product?
We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense. From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options: Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site. Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name. My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0