White branded website & SEO
-
Hi guys,
We might have as a new project to create a white branded website for a big portal in our local market (which have a strongest domain than ours): the goal will be to reach their big mass of users and if possible, place this new site BEHIND us on the SERPs.
Since the content of the new website will basically be the same, we are considering 2 solutions:
-
to "noindex" the site on search engines, which is a "secure" way to not create ourself a competitor
-
to allow the site to be indexed on search engines but using the "rel=canonical" strategy to not be affected by duplicate content penalties
(For example, we plan to add rel='canonical' href='http://www.ourdomain.com/category1/product2' /> on their page http://newsubdomain.theirdomain.com/category1/product2)
The main question is: can the white branded website rank better than our site even with the "canonical" strategy?
(Of course we could "lower" the quality of the white-branded website pages to avoid that risk... but if somebody has better advices, we would be glad to hear them )
-
-
This would mean that we have to lower the quality of the white-branded website pages (putting less filters, contents) or simply "nofollow" it..
Thanks Matt for your opinion!
(For the ones interested in the topic, there is also an interesting blog post + comments here: http://moz.com/ugc/using-whitelabel-sites-for-seo)
-
I think I am in a good position to answer this as in February I completed a project which created clones or White Label exact copies of one of the websites I work on. The content, the pages, the URL's and everything was the same. We did give them all slight design changes though. The site has around 30 duplications now around the web. The reason for these White Label websites is due to having "salesmen" of our branded products who are self employed and needed a website to point their own clients and customers to in the hope that it shows off the range.
Now we developed 30 of these and the first couple I started using canonical tags on every single page except the homepage. Even though largely successful, there were still some pages indexed above the main website in SERP's - luckily for no major keywords. It shows that canonical does not work in every single case perfectly.
Since then, we have noindexed and nofollowed every single link on each site and none of them are indexed nor ranked in search results now. In addition to this, we also set up canonical tags to be safe.
Hopefully that helps!
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
-
Why my website's Alexa rank is dropping
My website Alexa rank has dramatically dropped in the past 3 months: Website: www.sastasundar.com End of July, 2012: 5217 Global, 265 Local(India) But Now: ** 29260** Global, 2274 Local(India) Definitely something big has affected my global ranking and I'm not able to figure it out. Please help.
Competitive Research | | foreseegame0 -
What is the best website traffic measurement tool?
Now that my beloved Compete.com is done I'd love to know your favorite free website traffic measurement tool. PS, please don't say Alexa! 🙂
Competitive Research | | vinadvisor0 -
Can NoFollow Links Hurt SEO Efforts?
Hi Mozzers' I've been doing some research on a few sites and found that one or two contain allot of nofollow links, can these have a negative effect on seo efforts?
Competitive Research | | Kal-SEO0 -
Ahrefs or Majestic SEO
Hi Guys, I'm looking to purchase 1 of the above services and I'm just wondering which one you guys think is best? Looking a ahrefs they seem to update there index more often. Thanks, Scott
Competitive Research | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
I would like a good SEO company
Hi, I know this must be a repeated question but I would like to have an SEO company that would take care of getting my site on the top three pages of google and I would like some advice over my website. I have been investing in link building for a month now but I think my meta tag might not be the most appropriate, i should probably have various and came across your website. I have found zero negative feed back on your company, I run other business but this is my first online experience and don't have the time to give it the SEO so with that in mind I would like to know what SEO packages would you recommend for my business and in what time would I be seeing page ranks in google bing and yahoo. I hope you can help me out, I'm a newbie at this and my online business is interesting and want to see it already operating my website is sheep buy.com, concept is people can sell for free, not just post an item like a classified site but actually sell for free through paypal and we don't charge a fee, so would really want some insight. Hope you can help me out. Beat regards Jerry
Competitive Research | | Jerrysb0 -
Can i have chance to rank higher than official website in google local domains ?
Q : can i have chance to rank higher than official website in google local domains ? for example : rank higher than microsoft,kaspersky,nokia etc... in google italy or google germany or any other local domain for google
Competitive Research | | activeacts0 -
50,000 Links From The Same Website
Hey Mozers, I was conducting competitive research for a client of mine and I discovered one of their competitors has over 50,000 backlinks! After removing my heart from my stomach I realized that 99.9% of the links came from a single website that doesn't have nearly that many pages. Has anyone experienced this in the past? And if so what exactly is going on? C
Competitive Research | | calindaniel0