How do I fix a multiple domain mess?
-
I just picked up an account that is a franchisee and they have 6 exact match domains plus their main domain (all exact duplicates, not 301s). GA shows the main domain as getting the lion's share of hits, but for some important local keywords, the exact match domains rank higher. Some pages may have the exact match domain, primary domain and the franchise domain all ranking on the same SERP. Yuk!
My strategy is to work on the main domain and as the work progresses, the main site will surpass the exact match domains and main franchise domain for the important searches. For the exact match domains I plan on just leaving them alone. Is this a sound strategy? I could pull the exact match domains down, but since they rank well for their keywords, it seems most sensible to leave them up. What do you think?
-
Good point on owning the page! Phasing out the EMD's over time sounds like a good way to go.
-
3 domains ranking in the same SERP? Not necessarily a bad thing there, as you now own that page. Must help with the CTR.
My gut tells me that duplicate content is hurting your main site more than the traffic to the EMD justifies. Leaving the duplicate content up may continue to cripple your rankings over time.
Fortunately, you have a lot of tools at your disposal. If the backlinks aren't spammy, you shouldn't have much problem redirecting the domains to the main site. I'd experiment with redirecting a single EMD (exact match domain) and filing a change of address with Google Webmaster tools. (here's an excellent guide on site migration: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos)
After this, look to see if the keywords sending traffic to the old domain now send traffic to the new. I'm not sure migrating one site out of 6 is going to make that big of difference, but it's much safer than migrating all six at once - which could be seen as somewhat suspicious by Google.
My guess is that combining your content into a single domain will give you a ranking/traffic boost that justifies the trouble.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO
-
They are all .com extensions. [service[city].com withing the same county in a US metro area.
Kris
-
Hello,
What extensions are these domains? are they different country gilds?
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
-
New domain wipes out domain authority
A client wanted to change their domain name, which we have now done. The site content itself is exactly the same. We put 301 redirect links in so that Google searchers would redirect from the old site to the new one. However Moz then said that it couldn't crawl the old domain because of the redirects and advised creating a brand new campaign for the new domain. We have done this but now Moz says that the domain authority of the new site is 2 (it was 14 on the old domain). Specifics are:
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti
old domain: https://ryemeadcleaning.co.uk
new domain: https://ryemeadgroup.co.uk So basically it seems like we're starting again from scratch with the new domain and all the SEO from the old domain has been lost? Have we done it wrong?0 -
Recently re-built our site and changed domain. Now I want to go back to old domain - it it a bad idea?
About a year ago I rebuilt our website and changed our domain name. We rent villas in Tuscany, we used to be 'invitationtotuscany.com'. Then I started doing the same in Provence, and in the italian lakes, so i had further sites called invitationtoprovence.com and invitationtotheitalianlakes.com. But maintaining them was awkward and I wanted to have one site. So I put them all onto invitationto.com and did 301s from the old domains and sites. Now I'd dropped off organic search results and I've also realised that invitationto.com is far less clear as a business address. My inclination is to go back to invitationtotuscany.com - Tuscany is still 80% of our business and have the other areas in there too - optimised for SEO for Provence etc. I'm being told its a really bad idea to change domain, 301 the old one, and then revert to the original domain. But I'm suffering anyway, so I wonder if I sjhouldn't just bite the bullet. A lot of my old good backlinks still point to invitationtotuscany.com (BBC, Sunday Times, etc) and the DA is 33 against 22 on the new one.. All help gratefully received! : )
Technical SEO | | DanWrightson0 -
How to get the most value out of an additional domain?
Hi, My company domain is wire.com. We recently also acquired wire.chat domain What's the best way to get value out of that additional domain? Wire is a messaging platform so "chat" is relevant but "wire chat" is not really a high volume term We don't have a whole lot of content, certainly no resources to build out additional valuable website Is simply redirecting traffic the only sensible to thing given the above restriction? Any technical issues to be mindful of? Thanks, Siim
Technical SEO | | Siim-at-Wire0 -
How to fix duplicate content caused by tags?
I use SEMRush, and the issue they are finding is I have 30 duplicate content issues. All seem to be caused by the tags I add in my portfolio pieces. I have looked at my SEO settings (taxonomies, etc) in the Wordpress site, and don't know what I am doing wrong....any advice how to fix? I have attached a screen shot VsYv2wY
Technical SEO | | cschwartzel0 -
Parked Domains
I have a client who has a somewhat odd situation for their domains. They've been really inconsistent with how they've used them over the years, which makes for a slightly sticky situation. The client has two domains: compname.com and fullcompanyname.com. Right now, their website is just HTML (no CMS) and all of the URLs are relative, so both domains work. Since the new website will be in WordPress, they need to commit to one domain as the primary. Right now, it looks like compname.com is the one they've used the most in ads and such, so I'm going to recommend they go with that. However, the client has also used fullcompanyname.com a lot. They don't want to have to setup individual 301 redirects for everything. I think it's ridiculous, but you can lead a horse to water... Our developer has done some research and he may have found a solution that will satisfy the client. I just want to find out if there are any SEO implications. The possible plan is to us compname.com as the primary domain and to park fullcompanyname.com. That way, if someone visits fullcompanyname.com/products/my-favorite-product, it will still work without having to setup 301 redirects. Since the domain is parked, Google won't recognize it as duplicate content, correct? Just to be clear on the whole situation, I'm insisting that all of the website URLs need 301 redirects, regardless of the domain. The primary concern is with a lot of other stuff on the server that isn't related to the site (email campaign landing pages, image files, assets that are pulled in by the client's software, etc.). The client's concern is about redirecting all that other stuff (and there is a lot of it--thousands of files). The parked domain would seem to fix that, but I want to make sure that the client won't get Google slapped.
Technical SEO | | BopDesign0 -
Www vs no-www duplicate fix?
Hi all, I have more or less published two versions of our site. One on "www" and one without. And of course we uncovered it during our SEO crawl as "duplicate" content/titles. My guess (hope) is this is something that can be easily fixed on the server side, but I don't have a lot of knowledge around it. Does anyone know?
Technical SEO | | Becky_Converge0 -
Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ifbyphone0 -
How do I fix these duplicate URLs?
HI guys, I ran a report on my site and it shows some duplicate titles (example below). Do I need to add something to the htaccess file or another file to fix this? I understand that the search engines should only see 1 URL for the page. 2 pages have "Bikes for sale | used bikes | second hand bicycles" title pauslwebsite.com/bikes/ paulswebsite.com/bikes/index.asp Thanks
Technical SEO | | paulmund0