Two identical websites need ranking locally
-
Hi
Wondering if someone can advise.
We have two websites with a .ie domian and .co.uk domain (e-commerce stores)
The websites are identical so we need to address duplicate content issue. The issue we have is we are targeting both local Google to rank, google.ie and google.co.uk.
Obviously to handle duplicate content we are going to have to "rel can" the one of the websites, which will probably be the .ie domain.
Question is, will this effect the ranking within the .ie domian on google.ie.
And any advice on how anyone else handles this situation would be greatly appreciated, we have had no issue ranking before with one domain on a local search engine, but this is the first time we have come across needing to rank two domains with identical content on each local search engine
Thanks in advance
John
-
Hi Andy
Yes, hear you loud and clear. I think actually treating everything on the two websites as different entities is the way to go, different url extensions subtle changes to headings etc, and try our best to mix content up, even if we need to add to it (although I will be braking my Golden rule of not creating content for clients websites, my real pet hate at web development stage.)
Thanks again for your help and advice, really appreciated, and your kind offer of help, I may take you up, so expect PM soon offering copious amounts of Guinness in return for advise
Kind Regards
John
-
yeh! - sleep whats that?
in that case try to optimise things like the page titles to the country and the description if you can amend that somehow ... maybe slightly change the way urls are output (one with brand name one without) that other thing you could do is have microformats on the site you are preferring over the other.
Something I did find once a while back is that if you have 2 very similiar sites and you optimise in different ways (eg with microformats above) then you can in some ways get an advantage over competitors by blocking listings.
Hope that helps - feel free to message me more detail such as urls and i can take a look and see what else i can advise.
-
Hi Andy
Thanks for reply.
Yes, we did suggest using a .com, the client has the .com also, but the client has a preference to use local domains as there will be a small bit of bespoke pages relating to each country, but in the vast the same content on each website.
We even suggested sub domains with a JS redirect for each country of the .com, but we have to work with .co.uk and .ie
We has also considered mixing the content descriptions up for each product. so they wont be exactly identical, unfortunately after receiving the for product descriptions, there is little or no in the actual descriptions that will allow for making each identical to each website.
But yes, I do take your point regarding large manufactures who have a local site for each country, with basically the same description for each product, they don't have the duplicate content issue effecting their rankings, but lots of other factors contribute to that I imagine.
I love this quote, " if you can't don't loose sleep and optimise elsewhere like hell", if only
Regards
John
-
it's a little tricky to answer the question for a few reasons - but first there is a the question of could you not buy the .com and target both from the one site - and avoid this issue?
Other than that it maybe worth considering some mixing and twisting of content in someways as well as using rel=can - Google doesn't always see dupe product descriptions across sites as dupe content, if they did no page with a manufacturers description would rank - this translates to "if you can write your own great! if you can rewrite a bit or twist it - ok ... if you can't don't loose sleep and optimise elsewhere like hell!"
Hope that helps - though could just through up more questions
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
-
If I disavow bad Backlinks of my website. If, I create Backlinks again, those websites. Did that again become count in my Backlinks?
Hi, all please tell me. If I disavow bad Backlinks of my website. If, I create Backlinks again, those websites. Did that again become count in my Backlinks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sourav60 -
Installing SSL to website and site ranking
I am installing SSL to my website. Will it hurt my ranking in Google as the url will change and backlinks of the website are without ssl url.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Esnipper0 -
International website. Di I need a new website
i am looking to expand from the UK and open a location in the US. i curretly have a .co.uk domain. what would you recommend I do with th website, create a new one wth a .com domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Having issues crawling a website
We looked to use the Screaming Frog Tool to crawl this website and get a list of all meta-titles from the site, however, it only resulted with the one result - the homepage. We then sought to obtain a list of the URLs of the site by creating a sitemap using https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. Once again however, we just go the one result - the homepage. There is something that seems to be restricting these tools from crawling all pages. If you anyone can shed some light as to what this could be, we'd be most appreciative.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Website Indexing Issues - Search Bots will only crawl Homepage of Website, Help!
Hello Moz World, I am stuck on a problem, and wanted to get some insight. When I attempt to use Screaming Spider or SEO Powersuite, the software is only crawling the homepage of my website. I have 17 pages associated with the main domain i.e. example.com/home, example.com/sevices, etc. I've done a bit of investigating, and I have found that my client's website does not have Robot.txt file or a site map. However, under Google Search Console, all of my client's website pages have been indexed. My questions, Why is my software not crawling all of the pages associated with the website? If I integrate a Robot.txt file & sitemap will that resolve the issue? Thanks ahead of time for all of the great responses. B/R Will H.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarketingChimp100 -
We have two different websites with the same products and information, will that hurt our rankings?
We have two different domains, one for the UK and the other for the US, they have the exact same products, categories and information. (the information is almost the same in 400 products) We know that Google could recognize that as duplicate content, but will that actually hurt our rankings in both sites? Is it better if we create two completely different versions of the content on those pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoitWiser0 -
Rankings improvement strategy
I am working on my SEO strategies and though it would be good to get advice from awesome members: Our current rankings are on (Google United States) page 5. Our keywords have high competition and hence we need to follow tight plan. I want to learn some best strategies to get Page 1 rankings and how much time would be required approximately. (though I know its weird to ask for time in SEO but what I mean is some case studies or examples of how long you waited when you have pushed your website from page 5 to page 1) What rank maintenance strategies you follow in general. Does anyone have used any agency for rank maintenance for their niche.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EG0CENTRIX0 -
How to rank for difficult terms
I am helping launch a new business venture that sells oak furniture in the UK. The key product terms are along the lines of; oak bed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pretige12
oak dining table
oak chairs etc which are very popular search terms. Im used to being able to hang of local or branded search which arent available in this project. The domain is around 12 months old, it has few inbound links which we are working on now with an overseas freelancer (keeping an eye on them). The pages of the site are unique-content rich and the titles and other meta boxes are ticked. What else would the experts recommend?0