3 Sites Covering Similar Topics & Panda
-
My question will take a bit of explaining, so here goes:
I have 3 blogs on the same server:
1. personal finance blog;
2. credit card blog;
3. prepaid credit card blog.
The personal finance blog is my flagship site started in 2007, which feeds my family and pays the mortgage. By contrast, the other two sites (started in 2008 and 2010) I would gladly kill if the result would help my personal finance blog.
In the fall of 2010 (before Panda) the prepaid card blog was penalized by Google. This has been confirmed by Google in response to a reconsideration request. Of course, they don't say why. I've tried a number of things and resubmitted the site, but with no luck.
Both the personal finance blog and credit card blog were hit by Panda 2 (April 11, 2011) and have not recovered.
While the personal finance site covers many topics (e.g., investing, credit, debt, money management), its income comes largely from credit cards. We review individual credit cards and have pages that list cards by category (e.g., balance transfer, cash back, travel).
The credit card blog does the same thing, but of course covers credit cards in more depth. There is a similar overlap between the prepaid card blog on the one hand, and the credit card blog and personal finance blog on the other. However, all content is unique.
I do not currently link between the sites, although until a few months ago I had blogroll links between the sites and a few (less than 10) content links.
If you've made it this far (and I hope you have), here are my questions:
1. Could the existence of the credit card and prepaid credit card sites be hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in Google, whether via Panda or otherwise?
2. If there is a reasonable chance that the answer to question 1 is yes, what would you suggest I do?
Of course, I could just take down the sites, but I wonder if there are other options.
One thought I had was to deindex the two card sites (I assume I can do this by disallowing googlebot via robots.txt) and give it time. Would Google treat this as if the sites did not exist? Both sites get a fair amount of traffic from bing and yahoo, so this option appeals to me. Of course, for all I know the existence of the two card sites are hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in bing and yahoo, too.
I thought about selling the sites, but if they are hurting my personal finance site, I grow concerned about how google distinguishes between a site being sold and a webmaster just trying to make the sites look like they are owned by different people. In this regard, I've never tried to hide the common ownership of the sites and have no intention of doing that now.
If I kill the sites, should I redirect them to my personal finance site? For the penalized prepaid card site, this seems both risky and unhelpful. But perhaps redirecting the credit card site is an option.
Given that the personal finance site is my livelihood, I greatly appreciate your thoughts on my dilemma.
-
I don't think the relationship of your other sites is having any effect on your rankings but it maybe Google post Panda is showing syndicated versions of your content as the most relevant. Finance and Making money online are very competitive niches and scraping/syndication is rife.
I recommend that you firstly make sure that when you publish your blog posts you are pinging pubsubhubbub to make sure Google knows you are the originating source.
Two questions:
Which landing pages and keywords have seen the biggest traffic change in the past 6-12 months?
Have you checked your competitor and your own link profiles for any recent changes ?
-
I don't think the content is duplicated, apart from some scrapers. I deal with the scrapers when I can, but I have to believe that the canonical tag and publication date take care of any issues.
As I said, I don't link between the sites anymore. I've had several people suggest that I move them to separate servers and even "hide" affiliate links by using redirects contained in folders that are blocked from search engines.
Maybe I'm naive here, but if I have to hide what I'm doing from search engines, I just don't do it.
-
Alan, appreciate the response. The more I think about it, I have to agree with your conclusion. There are plenty of companies that own multiple sites in the same vertical. It's well known, for example, that Bankrate owns creditcards.com and bankaholic. Each of these sites covers credit cards in depth.
-
I know what is like when you have a problem and can not find an aswer you start to see every thing as a potental cause, but I dont think it the other sites have anything to do with it.
-
I always look at these things the same...
If you have more than one site linking to other sites, ensure they are on a different server. OK, perhaps I am being overly cautious here, but knowing what Google can be like, I would not take chances.
If there are no links between the sites, then as long as the content is unique (as you say it is), then you have no problems from a duplication point of view. If each site serves a different purpose, there should be no problems.
I would need to look at the sites to get an idea why Panda hit them - there are so many possibilites. The main ones as we know though were thin or duplicate content and adverts.
Is there a possibility your content has been duplicated somewhere else?
Andy
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
-
Issue with AMP pages
Hello, We have implemented AMP on our blog pages, but now some of the Web pages are also being shown like AMP pages. ( no footer and no navigation ) What could have gone wrong ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johnroger0 -
Having problem with multiple ccTLD sites, SERP showing different sites on different region
Hi everyone, We have more than 20 websites for different region and all the sites have their specific ccTLD. The thing is we are having conflict in SERP for our English sites and almost all the English sites have the same content I would say 70% of the content is duplicating. Despite having a proper hreflang, I see co.uk results in (Google US) and not only .co.uk but also other sites are showing up (xyz.in, xyz.ie, xyz.com.au)The tags I'm using are below, if the site is for the US I'm using canonical and hreflang tag :https://www.xyz.us/" />https://www.xyz.us/" hreflang="en-us" />and for the UK siteshttps://www.xyz.co.uk/" />https://www.xyz.co.uk/" hreflang="en-gb" />I know we have ccTLD so we don't have to use hreflang but since we have duplicate content so just to be safe we added hreflang and what I have heard/read that there is no harm if you have hreflang (of course If implemented properly).Am I doing something wrong here? Or is it conflicting due to canonicals for the same content on different regions and we are confusing Google so (Google showing the most authoritative and relevant results)Really need help with this.Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shahryar890 -
Reindexing a site with www.
We have a site that has a mirror - i.e. www.domain.com and domain.com - there is not redirect both url's work and show pages so basically a site with 2 sets of URLs for each page. We have changed it so the domain.com and all assorted pages 301 redirect to the right URL with www. i.e. domain.com/about 301's to www.domain.com/about In the search engines the domain.com is the site indexed and the only www. page indexed is the homepage. I checked in the robots.txt file and nothing blocking the search engines from indexing both the www. and non www. versions of the site which makes me wonder why did only one version get indexed and how did the clients avoid a duplicate content issue? Secondly is it best to get the search engines to unidex domain.com and resubmit www.domain.com for the full site? We are definately staying with the www.domain.com NOT domain.com so need to find the best way to get the site indexed with www. and remove the non www. Hope that makes sense and look forward to everyone's input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Using both dofollow & nofollow links within the same blog site (but different post).
Hi all, I have been actively pursuing bloggers for my site in order to build page rank. My website sells women undergarments that are more on the exotic end. I noticed a large amount of prospective bloggers demand product samples. As already confirm, bloggers that are given "free" samples should use a rel=no follow attribute in their links. Unfortunately this does not build my page rank or transfer links juice. My question is this: is it advisable for them to also blog additional posts and include dofollow links? The idea is for the blogger to use a nofollow when posting about the sample and a regular link for a secondary post at a later time. What are you thoughts concerning this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 90miLLA0 -
Site Transfer and Downtime
If I want to transfer my website from yahoo to another web host without having any down time how would I do that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Sites banned from Google?
How do you find out sites banned from Google? I know how to find out sites no longer cached, or is it the same thing once deindexed? As always aprpeciate your advice everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Merging three sites to one
Hi guys, I just wanted confirmation if this is the right way to go about doing this. I need to merge three websites and I've never done three websites in to a brand new site before. Ok so we have Sitex.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero
Sitey.com
Sitez.com We've created a SiteB.com SiteB.com has SiteB.com/SiteXCat
SiteB.com/SiteYCat
SiteB.com/SiteZCat Each X,Y and Z have over 1,000 pages. They only have about 10 pages each with Page Authority above 10 and the domains arn't that strong. What i plan to do is: 301 redirect each site domain (X,Y,,Z) to it's corresponding category. e.g. Sitex.com > SiteB.com/SiteXCat 301 redirect each page off X,Y,Z that has a Page Authority above 10 to their new pages on SiteB.com Then, I'm unsure if i should 410 every other URL... I don't think its worht 301 every single URL if they arn't in search results much - but maybe it is if they have a lot of inbound links even with low page authority? Any ideas and does the above seem the best practise? Thanks.0 -
Help with a Sticky Site
Hey Everyone - I work for a company that is just getting into SEO. We have had some successes, but one project lately has got us stumped. We have been working hard, but have been unable to make an impact in Google rankings with the following site: http://stoneycreekinn.com/locations/index.cfm/DesMoines We are trying to optimize for the keyword phrase, "des moines hotel" This hotel is a branch location of a hotel chain in the Midwest. *Note we've already moved up some other branch locations for this hotel chain successfully. We've used several tools including the SEOmoz tool and seem to have higher marks than those sites that rank above us in Google surprisingly. Any idea what we're missing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markhope0