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
-
OK to have multiple local business structured data on one website?
Hello there, I'm working on implementing local business structured data for a website but we have multiple offices. Is it okay from a Google perspective to add different local business data on different pages of the website, or can I only use one set of local business data site wide? Many thanks, Gill.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cannetastic0 -
Ranking on google search
Hello Mozzers Moz On page grader shows A grade for the particular URL,but my page was not ranking on top 100 Google search. Any help is appreciated ,Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sobanadevi0 -
Training Website Improvements...
Hi Folks, I'm in the process of going over our corporate website with a view to improving on-page optimisation, layout, design and user experience and I would like your feedback on what you think I should improve or change with respect to SEO. Some of my ideas include: Restructure Home Page to Better Show Our Services Possibly Add a Slider to the Home Page (I know engagement rates with these are generally low) Restructure the Course Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation) Restructure the Events Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation) Improve & Streamline the Booking Process AJAXIFY the Booking Process Improve Responsive Elements I'm also interested in conducting user testing before I go ahead and make any changes. What are your thoughts? What would you change? Thanks. Gaz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PurpleGriffon0 -
Am I missing an issue on my website?
Are there any glaring issues that I am missing with my site? I am building links, and growing the profile but had seen a drop in rankings a couple of months ago. Is this do to a site issue or am I just missing something? www.wallybuysell.com Any help would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CKerr0 -
100% links within the website - could it rank?
Hi, If I create blog posts inside my website and link it back to my website, Would it still rank? I understand that its better to get links from the established domain. But I just wonder what kind of impact would my site have if the blog posts within my site link back to itself for ranking. Please let me know. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zsyed0 -
Local and Organic Listings
Hi, My client has a number of stores across the country (UK) and ideally I would like them to appear in both the local and organic listings - at the moment I appear more often than not on page one for one or the other - I have noticed however that some pages appear in both. I understand that Google will not place a listing for the same page in both local and organic so I need to optimise a page on the site for organic and point my local listing to a different page (home page?). On some results though I am seeing my local result appearing with the home page URL listed but the actual link points to the internal store page which is the same page that is appearing in the organic listing (both on page one). Other local listings of mine appear with the store page URL showing in the result. I haven't set anything up differently for these stores. Can anyone explain why this is happening? Thanks, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOBirmingham810 -
Reading suggestions for a local french small biz website?
Greetings Mozians! I'm working on this small biz french website in north east canada. It's very small and the domain is new, we have no backlinks, so it's hard to rank for keywords. We do have a specific target with few expressions in mind. It's not really competitive but we don't rank really well. Do you have any articles or document that you would suggest me reading? Thanks a lot everyone. Here's the site : http://www.copiescourrierplanslg.com/accueil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Akeif0 -
Local Offices Optimization
One of my client has offices in 11 different cities and we have a page on the website for each office. I have optimized each page as well as I could for each city. Every on-page aspect I nailed and I even added a unique 100-150 words text and 3 pictures of the offices to each page to make sure Google wouldn't penalize me for having nearly identical pages. Here's one of the page (the Montreal office): http://pierreroy.com/en/offices/bankruptcy-trustee-montreal/ However, even after doing all that, I can't seem to get as many #1 rankings as I think I should. I get outranked by websites not optimizing their page properly... Is it because of inbound links metrics? How do you build links to each office page without spamming? Any advice? Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimumweb0