Duplicate Content across 4 domains
-
I am working on a new project where the client has 5 domains each with identical website content. There is no rel=canonical.
There is a great variation in the number of pages in the index for each of the domains (from 1 to 1250). OSE shows a range of linking domains from 1 to 120 for each domain.
I will be strongly recommending to the client to focus on one website and 301 everything from the other domains. I would recommend focusing on the domain that has the most pages indexed and the most referring domains but I've noticed the client has started using one of the other domains in their offline promotional activity and it is now their preferred domain.
What are your thoughts on this situation? Would it be better to 301 to the client's preferred domain (and lose a level of ranking power throught the 301 reduction factor + wait for other pages to get indexed) or stick with the highest ranking/most linked domain even though it doesn't match the client's preferred domain used for email addresses etc.
Or would it better to use cross-domain canoncial tags?
Thanks
-
EGOL - thanks for advice. Yes there are lots of ilinks between the domains. Although I also have clients who have done this deliberately for perceived gain, I think in this case the client has made an honest mistake by simply applying their CMS (with relative links) to each of the domains they thought they should purchase. It's confused a bit further by one section using https with an absolute domain so users can end up migrating from one domain to another and from http to https!
As an SEO I also have inclination to 301 page-by-page to best ranking site. However, as I mentioned to Thomas (above) I think the client will probably want to go with their preferred domain and as such I'll 301 page-by-page to that one. I'll discuss with the client and post the outcome.
-
Thomas - thanks for your reply. All the domains are very similar - variations from the same core concept. I have a feeling that the client will want to standardise on their preferred domain and as you say it is the easiest to remember.
-
Lots of businesses build three sites because they think it is a good way to kickass on their competitors. It can be really hard or even impossible get get them to give up on that idea.
I am going to guess that you have a second issue... they have links on all of these sites point to each other because they think it will help their pagerank and SERP position. Really hard to talk people out of this practice too.
If I owned these five sites I would shut down four of them and redirect all of them page-by-page to my best ranking site... and it would become my preferred domain. There is something else that you might try to talk this client out of.
Good luck!
-
Wow... so many options. It is really hard to give a good answer without knowing what the domains are and the differences in the domain names themselves, but here are a few thoughts.
If the domains provide some distinct differences, whether that be target audience (grandmaroadbikes.com) or branding (ZippzRoadBikes.com) then I would start with the cross domain canonical tags. There are many sites that stand on their own while using cross-domain canonicals and maintaining their own brand.
How similar are the domain names? If the domains are too similar, and unique branding can not really be achieved, then I would consider the consolidation. My gut reaction as an advertiser is to stick with the easiest to say and type. I assume the domain being marketed offline wins that prize. I would focus on promoting that domain. Further, many people will loose a bit of trust if they type in www.AdvertisedDomain.com and get www.DomainUnAdvertised.com. Plus you don't want to cause brand confusion.
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
-
Duplicate content across domains?
Does anyone have suggestions for managing duplicate product/solution website content across domains? (specifically parent/child company domains) Is it advisable to do this? Will it hurt either domain? Any best practices when going down this path?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pilgrimquality0 -
Bigcommerce & Blog Tags causing Duplicate Content?
Curious why moz would pick up our blog tags as causing duplicate content, when each blog has a rel canonical tag pointing to either the blog post itself and on the tag pages points to the blog as a whole. Kinda want to get rid of the tags in general now, but also feel they can add some extra value to UX later on when we have many more blog posts. Curious if anyone knows a way around this or even a best solution practice when faced with such odd issues? I can see why the duplicate content would happen, but when grouping content into categories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Duplicated Content with Index.php
Good Afternoon, My website uses Joomla CMS and has the htaccess rewrite code enabled to ensure the use of search engine friendly URLs (SEF's). While browsing the crawl diagnostics I have found that Moz considers the /index.php URL a duplicate to our root. I will always under the impression that the htaccess rewrite took care of that issue and obviously I would like to address it. I attempted to create a 301 redirect from the index.php URL to the root but ran into an issue when attempting to login to the admin portion of the website as the redirect sent me back to the homepage. I was curious if anyone had advice for handling the index.php duplication issue, specifically with Joomla. Additionally, I have confirmed that in Google Webmasters, under URL parameters, the index.php parameter is set as 'Representative URL'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandonEML0 -
Duplicate content on yearly product models.
TL;DR - Is creating a page that has 80% of duplicated content from the past year's product model where 20% is about the new model changes going to be detrimental to duplicate content issues. Is there a better way to update minor yearly model changes and not have duplicated content? Full Question - We create landing pages for yearly products. Some years the models change drastically and other years there are only a few minor changes. The years where the product features change significantly is not an issue, it's when there isn't much of a change to the product description & I want to still rank on the new year searches. Since I don't want duplicate content by just adding the last year's model content to a new page and just changing the year (2013 to 2014) because there isn't much change with the model, I thought perhaps we could write a small paragraph describing the changes & then including the last year's description of the product. Since 80% of the content on the page will be duplicated from the last year's model, how detrimental do you think this would be for a duplicate content issue? The reason I'm leaving the old model up is to maintain the authority that page has and to still rank on the old model which is still sold. Does anyone else have any other better idea other than re-writing the same information over again in a different way with the few minor changes to the product added in.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Ecommerce Duplicate Product Descriptions across 3 websites
Hi, We are an e commerce company that has our own domain but also sell the same products on eBay and Amazon. What is the feeling on the same exact descriptions being used on different platforms? Do they count as duplicate content? Will our domain be punished/penalised as our domain does not have as much authority as EBay or Amazon? We have over 5,000 products with our own hand written product descriptions. We want our website to be the main place/ have priority over the above market places. What's the best suggestion/solution? thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Roy19730 -
Duplicate Content on Press Release?
Hi, We recently held a charity night in store. And had a few local celebs turn up etc... We created a press release to send out to various media outlets, within the press release were hyperlinks to our site and links on certain keywords to specific brands on our site. My question is, should we be sending a different press release to each outlet to stop the duplicate content thing, or is sending the same release out to everyone ok? We will be sending approx 20 of these out, some going online and some not. So far had one local paper website, a massive football website and a local magazine site. All pretty much same content and a few pics. Any help, hints or tips on how to go about this if I am going to be sending out to a load of other sites/blogs? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Duplicate content
I have just read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world and I would like to know which option is the best fit for my case. I have the website http://www.hotelelgreco.gr and every image in image library http://www.hotelelgreco.gr/image-library.aspx has a different url but is considered duplicate with others of the library. Please suggest me what should i do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | socrateskirtsios0 -
How to deal with category browsing and duplicate content
On an ecommerce site there are typically a lot of pages that may appear to be duplications due to category browse results where the only difference may be the sorting by price or number of products per page. How best to deal with this? Add nofollow to the sorting links? Set canonical values that ignore these variables? Set cononical values that match the category home page? Is this even a possible problem with Panda or spiders in general?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0