Competitor Ranking High has 2 Domains, But Duplicate Website ?
-
I was using OSE and noticed all the backlinks to one of our competitors is there other domain name, which is the EXACT SAME website. You can enter both url's and they display the same content. They are not useing any canonical tags either. Why are they not penalized for duplicate content? And for using there own website for backlinks ? We try to do everything right, but still cannot beat them.
Any thoughts on this?
-
Your competitors obviously knew what they were doing. This is what many would call Black Hat SEO, and while it can provide some good results in the short term, it's shady activity.
SEO should never be about gaming the SERPs. It should be about providing useful signals to search engines to tell them how to rank your pages.
Companies that do this type of stuff are only hurting themselves in the long run. I firmly believe if you continue to use solid white hat SEO techniques you'll come out on top of all of the gamers out there in the end.
Crime only pays until you get caught.
-
I can share a personal experience that might help clarify how the duplicate site issue works.
My site contains a sitemap which is automatically updated each day. When the new sitemap is created, Google and Bing are pinged. I also have a backup job scheduled to run daily. It is a perfectly standardized setup.
I wanted to do some testing with my site, so I restored my most recent backup to www.mydomain.com/test. The /test site was an exact duplicate of my domain. My lack of forethought was quite costly.
The /test site generated a sitemap, pinged the search engines, and was listed. In retrospect, I should have turned off the sitemap job and blocked the /test site in robots.txt. Worse, I didn't catch my error for over a month. While doing a search I noticed the result took me to the test site. After some troubleshooting I realized the error.
Bottom line, anyone can run two sites with identical information. The problem is that both sites will get listed. So if you have a 100 page site which is duplicated, then Site A might have pages 1 - 50 listed, and site B might have pages 51 - 100 listed. The problem is your domain authority is split between the two sites.
Ultimately the problem is fixed by 301'ing one site to the other. When that happens you will lose some link juice due to the 301.
Your competitor can rank well on both sites. But the same page wont rank well on both sites. Only one of the duplicated pages will appear in the SERP.
-
I believe that you are lucky that they run two websites. The reason... they have gotten backlinks into both of those domains instead of focusing ALL of their backlinks into a single domain. That divides their power instead of concentrating it.
So, I don't worry about competitors who think that they are going to build five websites in the same niche to kickass on me. Let them do it, divide their energy, divide their time and divide the backlinks.
I will start sweating when they redirect all of their satellite sites to the homesite.
-
Hey, the other site may well show up on a site:example.com query, but that does not mean it is ranking for key terms. Equally, it may seem that they are getting equity from the links, they may even be getting some, but I would suggest there is likely something else at play here.
It's practically impossible to give you a more definitive answer without the URL though. Happy to take a look if you want to private message it to me on here.
Marcus
-
Whoops. Actually they both appear in google that way but the cached domain is there main domain. Does that mean that it is parked?
-
Wait! But when I do site:example.com/ in google . both websites are still being picked up.
-
I would rather not. Private email possibly.
-
Your right. Actually Last year they both ranked, now I am only seeing there main website. But I still do not understand why if they were doing that, why were they not affected by that? I am bugged by this because it seems like they are receiving a lot of power from there backlinks which is there domain that is no longer ranking.
-
Can you provide the sites? It's pretty hard to tell without looking at them.
-
I used to have a few competitors who ran multiple identical sites - all linking to one another.
Today just one site remains. Duplicates are filtered from the SERPs.
My bet is that these competitors will have just one site in the SERPs by this time next year.
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
-
Selling on eBay and Amazon, does it have a negative impact our your website?
_We sell on multiple platforms I.e own website, eBay, Amazon and have noticed over the last few years to hold a page 1 ranking on Google is becoming more and more difficult as the SERPs are saturated with the big brands. _ My question is, we've loaded all of our products and there lovely unique descriptions to eBay and Amazon, is there any chance that this content is helping eBay and Amazon rank (may be not by much!), but certainly not doing us any favours. As effectively why would you show our site in the search results for a product range, when all of the content/products already appear on eBay/Amazon which is several SERPs places higher? Is Google not inclined to think, "hey no need to show x site, as the content is already features on Amazon, why show it twice?" Any one have any thoughts?
Competitive Research | | bnknowles10 -
Screaming Frog for competitor research
Hi guys, Does somebody experienced an issue with Screaming Frog spider while trying to crawl a website? It's weird since no error message appears and at the same time the crawler cannot crawl anything. There is no restriction in the robots.txt. Has someone encountered such an issue? Thank you. Cheers
Competitive Research | | lgrozeva0 -
How to understand a site's current ranking
I know this is basic stuff, so sorry for the beginners post... I offer primarily web design services, and I need to know when taking on a new client, how can I assess the current 'lay of the land' for their site in terms of their SEO? I have had some issues in the past where launching a new design negatively affected their performance for their keywords, and obviously I would like to avoid this in future without having to go to 3rd parties. In particular I have an issue where the client themselves are very bad at giving information about what keywords they currently rank for, and what SEO activities they may have done in the past. How can I make these assessments myself? thanks for any help p
Competitive Research | | panamandm0 -
Competitors SERP's
One of our competitors is routinely achieving excellent SERP for brand related keywords within only a couple of months of adding the respective brand to their website. Full details are explained in the attached image to avoid the competitor being notified of this post via Google Alerts. Can anyone identify how they are achieving this and point me in the right direction? The other thing is that I was also achieving good SERPs for these and other brand related keywords but I seem to have dropped off the face of google for them, where my competitor has not and who continues to achieve the seemingly impossible. Thanks TOfVHD8
Competitive Research | | UnderMe0 -
What's the value of Exact Match Keyword Domains vs. Company Name Domains?
Hey Mozers, I was in a discussion this morning about the value of Exact Match Keyword domains vs. a company name domain and wanted to get a little more clarification. Let's say we are doing a site for a company called Favored Dental, and they have had the domain favoredental.com for quite a while and have their authority built up in it. Is it better to have favored-dental.com or favoreddental.co or keep its current form? The reasoning behind the alternate domains would be they have the exact match keyterm, in this case lets say "Favored Dental" is the keyterm we were going after. To my knowledge EMDs aren't as relevant as they'd use to be as Google would rather branding of companies instead of keyterm domains? Is this correct, or do EMDs of keywords you're going after hold higher authority? Thanks for the clarification!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
Why do keyword competition rankings differ between Google and SeoMoz?
I am a novice at keyword ranking etc. so I appreciate your patience! I checked a longtail keyword - how do i get out of this relationship - in Google AdWords and it came back 'low competition.' When I entered it in SeoMoz it came back as 'very competitive.' Any thoughts? I appreciate your help.
Competitive Research | | UncleTodd0 -
How many Page Rank 8 sites are there?
Anyone have any estimate of how many Page Rank 8 sites are out there? Best, Steve
Competitive Research | | Aggie0 -
Competitor with over 100,000 links to duplicate copy ranks well, anyone know why?
One of our competitors has over 100,000 links on Yahoo site explorer, most of them are from pages on their site with duplicate content and they don't seem to have a focus on gaining backlinks, but the site still ranks really well. Can anyone think of a reason why this duplicate content hasn't been penalised by Google?
Competitive Research | | RobertHill0