Dupicated Site Issues?
-
We are launching a new site for the Australian market and the URL will just be siteAU.com.
Currently the tech team (before we came on board) has it setup with almost exactly the same content (including the site css/nav/structure etc). Some product page content is slightly different, and category pages have different product orders, plus there are location pages that are specific to AU, but otherwise it's the same.
The original site: site.ca has been around for 6+ years, with several thousand pages and solid organic ranking (though the last few months have dropped )
Will the new AU site create issues for the original domain? We also have siteUSA.com which follows the same logic and has been live for a while.
-
if you want to rank competitively in the US and AU then I strongly recommend local domains.
In my experience, subfolders on a single domain are less effective then local domains. The above solution can work and you are at an advantage that your CA site is established and is the "parent" site.
It is more work to maintain separate domains, but in my experience of managing .com sites, we have always faced a challenge because despite the target setting in WMT, Google still struggles to rank the UK site in the UK over the US site in many instances because it is on a .com and because there is a US version of the site.
-
Could work well. We would have some additional content challenges, but still consolidated. e.g. now on the same domain we would have thousands of more pages for the city-specific areas. But we would have those anyway on separate domains. My question though is if we would face any more local ranking challenges. e.g. within canada we may already rank for 'plumbing service' for example. If everything is consolidated, we wouldn't rank 2X for the same search term, but if on different domains, we could - in the respective countries. Local modifiers like City Plumbing Service could still work.
-
To me this seems like the optimal solution. With this setup you are not only eliminating the possible duplicate content issues, but you still have information for each region on the site.
Or you could use your country specific domains as landing pages, and optimize them for their home country while still hosting the majority of your content on your main domain.
-
Thanks for the input. One alternative we are pondering is keeping everything on the primary domain with sections for the countries we serve. So primary is Canada then we also serve AU and USA. There may be some branding issues, along with technical challenges with our order processing, but it would probably allow us to better control content.
Thoughts on this?
-
If you set the targeting in Webmaster Tools to AU only and the others to their corresponding markets then you are unlikely to face any duplicate content penalties.
Additional measures you need to consider are:
Focus the majority of link building and PR to respective markets i.e. try and get a higher ratio of links from local sites
Put local physical addresses on each site e.g. on the AU site have an address in Australia.Generally speaking, you are still going to have some issues with your non AU sites outranking your AU site on Google AU, as do sites in the UK, but if you take the measures above then you are sending a strong signal to the search engines that you are not trying to spam them.
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
-
Old sitemaps after site migration.
Hi, I was wondering if it's safe to remove all the sitemaps from the old site in search console? It's been 3 months since site migration from http://sitea.com (301 redirected) to http://siteb.com. Therefore, can I delete the old sitemap from the http://sitea.com from search console? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Linking to one of my own sites, from my site
Hi experts, I own a site for castingjobs (Site1) and a site for selling paintings (Site2). In a long time, I've had a link at the bottom of Site1, linking to Site 2. (Basicaly: Partnerlink: Link site 2). Site1 is for me the the only important site, since it's where Im making my monthly revenue. I added the link like 5 years ago or so, to try to boost site 2. My question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KasperGJ
1. Is it somehow bad for SEO for site 1, since the two sites have nothing to do with each other, they are basically just owned by me.
2. Would it make sense to link from Site 2 to Site 1 indstead?0 -
Google favoring old site over new site...
Hi, I started a new site for a client: www.berenjifamilylaw.com. His old site: www.bestfamilylawattorney.com was too loaded up with bad links. Here's the weird part: when you Google: "Los Angeles divorce lawyer" you see the old site come up on the 21st page, but Google doesn't even show the new site (even though it is indexed). It's been about 2 weeks now and no change. Has anyone experienced something like this? If so, what did you do (if anything). Also, I did NOT do a 301 redirect from old to new b/c of spammy links. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Potential Pagination Issue/ Duplicate content issue
Hi All, We upgraded our framework , relaunched our site with new url structures etc and re did our site map to Google last week. However, it's now come to light that the rel=next, rel=Prev tags we had in place on many of our pages are missing. We are putting them back in now but my worry is , as they were previously missing when we submitted the , will I have duplicate content issues or will it resolve itself , as Google re-crawls the site over time ?.. Any advice would be greatly appreciated? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Moving career site to new URL from main site. Will it hurt SEO for main page?
For one of our clients we are building a career site and putting it under a different URL and hosting service (mainly due to security concerns of hosting it under the same host and domain). almost 100% of the incoming traffic to their current career section (which it is in a sub-folder) receives traffic for branded keywords (brand + job/career/employment), that is, there are no job position specific keywords. The client is now worried that after moving the site, the inbound traffic to the main site will be severely affected as well as the SERP results. My questions are, will the non-career related SERPs be affected? I don't see how will they be but I could be wrong If no, how could we reassure her that the SEO to the main site wont be affected? are there any case studies of a similar case (splitting part of the website under a new URL and hosting service?) Thank you for your help. PS: this is my first post so please forgive me if this has been asked before. I could not find a good response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rflores0 -
Interesting site migration question.
Hi all. I'm looking for some thoughts on a migrations option we have. At the moment we have two E-Com sites ranking well for some of the same terms. An older site, and a nice new site. The older site is ranking very well for category and product terms, the new one is slowly coming up. Ideally we would like to have one site, the nice new one, and get rid of the old one. If I 301 the old site url's to the new sites will that bring the new site url's into the same position as the old ones? I'm just not sure how this effects sites that are already ranking well. Any ideas are welcomed but I'm really looking for a definitive answer. It's a big decision after all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PASSLtd0 -
Site #2 beats site #1 in every aspect?
Hey guys, loving SEOMoz so far and will definitely continue my subscription after the free trial. I have a question however, which I am really confused about. When researching my primary keyword, I have found that the second ranked site beats the top site in every single aspect, apart from domain age, which is almost 6 years for the top one and 6 months for the second. When I say every single aspect, I mean everything. More authority for the page and domain, more links, more anchor text links, more authoritive links, more social signals, more relevant links, better domain (although second ranked site is a .net), better MozRank, better MozTrust etc.... I have noticed though, that in the UK SERPs, those sites are switched, so #2 is actually #1. Could it be that the US SERPs just haven't updated yet, or am I missing something completely different.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | darrenspeed1 -
Getting rid of a site in Google
Hi, I have two sites, lets call them site A and site B, both are sub domains of the same root domain. Because of a server config error, both got indexed by Google. Google reports millions of inbound links from Site B to Site A I want to get rid of Site B, because its duplicate content. First I tried to remove the site from webmaster tools, and blocking all content in the robots.txt for site B, this removed all content from the search results, but the links from site B to site A still stayed in place, and increased (even after 2 months) I also tried to change all the pages on Site B to 404 pages, but this did not work either I then removed the blocks, cleaned up the robots.txt and changed the server config on Site B so that everything redirects (301) to a landing page for Site B. But still the links in Webmaster Tools to site A from Site B is on the increase. What do you think is the best way to delete a site from google and to delete all the links it had to other sites so that there is NO history of this site? It seems that when you block it with robots.txt, the links and juice does not disappear, but only the blocked by robots.txt report on WMT increases Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JacoRoux0