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.
Two websites vs each other owned by same company
-
My client owns a brand and came to me with two ecommerce websites. One website sells his specific brand product and the other sells general products in his niche (including his branded product).
Question is my client wants to rank each website for basically the same set of keywords.
We have two choices I'd like feedback on-
Choice 1 is to rank both websites for same keyword groupings so even if they are both on page 1 of the serps then they take up more real estate and share of voice. are there any negative possibilities here?
Choice 2 is to recommend a shift in the position of the general industry website to bring it further away from the industry niche by focusing on different keywords so they don't compete with each other in the serps.
I'm for choice 1, what about you?
-
I have came across similar situations before and I have to say that Choice 1 should be no problem at all as long as the content is fairly unique on each site. This should rule out the chance of duplicate content.
I guess it all depends on the volume, but for me I would go with choice 2. Simply because you then get to cover more spread and aren't stuck in one specific niche.
Truth is there is no right or wrong, both will work fine. It just depends on volume/competition
-
Thanks for the insight Patrick.
For many reasons the websites must remain separate, good suggestion though.
Rich
-
Hi there
I guess my main question is why two sites if you're trying to rank for the same set of keywords? Has he thought about combining? Moz has a great post on the potential benefit of combining two websites, but that's something you'll need to heavily research and chat with your client about. Here's that post.
If nothing else, more real estate sounds good to me so I would do option 1. Don't forget there are awesome Schema opportunities such as sameAs that can help you tie your properties together and help search engines understand your web presence. I would also make sure that you look into cross domain tracking so your client has a better understanding of his performance and eCommerce.
Hope this helps - good luck!
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
-
Two divisions, same parent company, identical websites
A client of mine has intentionally built two websites with identical content; both companies sell the same product, one via an 80 year old local brand, well known. The other division is a national brand, new, and working to expand. The old and new divisions cannot be marketed as a single company for legal reasons. My life would be simple if the rules for distinguishing between nation's could apply, but I only have city X, and The U.S. I understand there is no penalty for duplicate content per se but I need to say to Google, "if searcher is in city X, serve content X. If not, serve content U.S. Both sites have atrocious DA and from what GA tells me, the National content appears to have never been served in a SERP in 3 years. I've been asked to improve visibility for both sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kc_sunshines0 -
Two blogs on a single domain?
Hi guys, Does anyone have any experience of having (trying to rank) two separate blogs existing on one domain, for instance: www.companysite.com/service1/blogwww.companysite.com/service2/blogThese 2 pages (service 1 and service 2) offer completely different services (rank for different keywords).(for example, a company that provides 2 separate services: SEO service and IT service)Do you think it is a good/bad/confusing search engine practice trying to have separate blogs for each service or do you think there should be only one blog that contains content for both services?Bearing in mind that there is an already existing subdomain for a non-profit part of business that ranks for different keywords: non-profit.companysite.comand it will potentially have another blog so the URL would look like: non-profit.companysite.com/blogAny ideas would be appreciated!Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kellys.marketing0 -
How to Submit My new Website in All Search Engines
Hello Everyone, Can Any body help to suggest Good software, or Any other to easily Submit my website , to All Search Engines ? ? Any expert Can help please, Thanx in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative0 -
Microsites: Subdomain vs own domains
I am working on a travel site about a specific region, which includes information about lots of different topics, such as weddings, surfing etc. I was wondering whether its a good idea to register domains for each topic since it would enable me to build backlinks. I would basically keep the design more or less the same and implement a nofollow navigation bar to each microsite. e.g.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kinimod
weddingsbarcelona.com
surfingbarcelona.com or should I rather go with one domain and subfolders: barcelona.com/weddings
barcelona.com/surfing I guess the second option is how I would usually do it but I just wanted to see what are the pros/cons of both options. Many thanks!0 -
Credit Links on Client Websites
I know there have been several people who have asked this but a lot of them were back in 2012 before many of the google changes. My question is the same though. With all the changes with Google's algorithm. Is it okay to put your link on the bottom of your clients website. Like Web Design by, etc. Part of the reason is to drive traffic but also if someone is actually interested who designed the website, they will click it. But now reading about how bad links can hurt you tremendously, it makes me second guess if this is ok. My gut feeling says, no.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blackrino0 -
Effects of having both http and https on my website
You are able to view our website as either http and https on all pages. For example: You can type "http://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as http: as you navigate the site. You can also type "https://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as https: as you navigate the site. My question is....if you can view the entire site using either http or https, is this being seen as duplicate content/pages? Does the same hold true with "www.mywebsite.com" and "mywebsite.com"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec1 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
SeoMoz Crawler Shuts Down The Website Completely
Recently I have switched servers and was very happy about the outcome. However, every friday my site shuts down (not very cool if you are getting 700 unique visitors per day). Naturally I was very worried and digged deep to see what is causing it. Unfortunately, the direct answer was that is was coming from "rogerbot". (see sample below) Today (aug 5) Same thing happened but this time it was off for about 7 hours which did a lot of damage in terms of seo. I am inclined to shut down the seomoz service if I can't resolve this immediately. I guess my question is would there be a possibility to make sure this doesn't happen or time out like that because of roger bot. Please let me know if anyone has answer for this. I use your service a lot and I really need it. Here is what caused it from these error lines: 216.244.72.12 - - [29/Jul/2011:09:10:39 -0700] "GET /pregnancy/14-weeks-pregnant/ HTTP/1.1" 200 354 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; UrlCrawler; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot)" 216.244.72.11 - - [29/Jul/2011:09:10:37 -0700] "GET /pregnancy/17-weeks-pregnant/ HTTP/1.1" 200 51582 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; UrlCrawler; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot)"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jury0