Two sites with different URLs
-
I help organize an ecommerce site for a company that is named after the state that the company was founded in (ex: Florida Pipes). Our programmer is thinking about creating a duplicate site that would have a name that was more location agnostic so people shopping on the site would not think that they may be ordering from far away hence incurring extra shipping charges. He said that the site would only have a different URLs, name and homepage but would link to all of the same stuff that is on the site that is up now. He said that there would be no way to tell (possibly for the layperson) that the two sites were related. Is this a good practice? Would we be penalized in search results for having two URLs linking to the same content? (We are a 30 year old company that ranks very high for our main keyword)
Thank you for your input!
-
Good points. With the limited knowledge of SEO and ecommerce, I really do not think it's a good idea. I personally think that we just need to concentrate more on the site we do have and polish it up. Thank you for the response.
-
It is my opinion that no, this wouldn't really benefit you much. You could possibly have duplicate content issues, but you would most certainly have the problem of essentially doubling your SEO work. Having yourselves named after a state is not a huge deal. I worked for a company in a similar situation once and it didn't seem to hurt us much, it's really pretty common. Google provides ways of moving your URL if you wish to do that, but if it were me I'd steer clear of creating an entirely new website, unless you really just want to give your programmer a lot of work to do!
You might possibly setup a new ecommerce site and keep your old one as more of a corporate informational site. You would then want to do 301s (moved content) to the new site from your product pages. I am not fully sure of the ramifications of this (cross domain 301) though, someone else may want to comment on that.
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
-
Bounce rate high because customer login on different domain
Years ago we switch domain names for our site for almost everything except the client log in portal. Now we are experiencing really high bounce rates because site visitors will go to our site and then click on the client log in portal which takes them off our domain and on to our old domain. Because of this our bounce rate is around 80% and I know this is negatively effecting our traffic. Is there any way to fix this without switching the domain for the client log-in portal? Thanks for everyone's help!
Search Behavior | | Brit-Page0 -
Different SERPs positions UK - Ireland
Hi there! I've been checking rankings in UK and Ireland for the last months and I found something really interesting... "Belfast + keyword" - UK = 2º position / Ireland = 1º position "keyword + Belfast" - UK = 14º position / Ireland = 1º position *(same keyword) I don't understand how it is possible... Website is not geo-targeted so Google has no preference for any of these countries... Any ideas about why does it happen?
Search Behavior | | seosogood1 -
Is there a tool that will find a string from the source code from a list of URLs?
I need a tool that will run through a long list of URLs (from multiple domains), look for a specific string in the source code and then produce a CSV showing in which URLs the the string was found. This is for legitimate research, not for any nefarious purposes Any ideas of such a tool already exists?
Search Behavior | | richdan0 -
UK & Ireland Websites displaying same page differently in serps
Hi there, I have a Magento Enterprise store based in the UK and we have an Irish version which we created after finding an increasing amount of traffic from Ireland. One thing that I don't understand, is that if I search for one keyword on Google, the websites are displayed differently, when effectively they are identical websites. Here is how a result looks like for my UK store: http://i.imgur.com/NKSt4Qq.png And here is how a result looks like for my IE store: http://i.imgur.com/Cynv8Mz.png They both have the same Meta description, barring a few geographical words and terms. Both have on page descriptions as well as products. Yet the IE results display the description and the UK results display products and a tiny snippet of the description. Any ideas on how I can make my UK pages display like the IE one? Or, just why they are both displayed differently? Thanks
Search Behavior | | tomhall900 -
How come some local 7 pack listings link to site and some link to the G+ page?
Does anyone know how to fix this issue? Even though a site profile has had the website added to it Google continues to link the main "title tag" link to the G+ page and not the actual website domain. Thanks for any info in advance! https://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&q=dog+sitting+in+rockaway&oq=dog+sitting+in+rockaway&gs_l=hp.3..0i22i30l4.14871.16189.1.16397.8.8.0.0.0.0.296.2042.2-7.7.0...0.0...1c.1.15.psy-ab.Y1db0jo77V0&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.47244034,d.bmk&fp=722b460c2153b7be&biw=1920&bih=910
Search Behavior | | irvingw0 -
Disallow robots on a url effect?
Hello, I am using wordpress and on some of my top tag urls e.g : http://www.designzzz.com/tag/brushes/ there is an avg page rank of 4. I was reading somewhere that my huge jump in not selected count in index status in GWT is becuase of tags/categories urls. So i added disallow in my robots.txt for the url /tag What sort of effect will it have on my tag urls rankings or PR ?
Search Behavior | | wickedsunny10 -
Massive Google Drop on two sites!
Hi All, We have experienced a massive Google drop on Two of our eCommerce websites in the past week. From Feb - July we were ranked 2 for various key words In Aug we dropped to 8 In September to 96 if not lower. We pay for monthly link building and add unique product info each week (but not much new content such as articles or blogs). My SEO guys has not been that helpful and just sent me a link to the Panda update blog, which doesn't mean a great deal to me. Obviously this has had a massive effect on business, and ideally i need to diagnose the problem and find a new startegy on moving forward, so most likely looking for a for a new SEO guy/company as well. I need someone is proactive, communicates well and make constant suggestions about moving forward not just link building. One thing I would like to add is these two site have a different homepage, category and range structure, but do share some if the 2000 product database. Can anyone help? Any advice on sorting this would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks M
Search Behavior | | etsgroup0 -
Where can I find research into consumer behavior in URL input?
I have a hypothesis that the % of users that type URLs is decreasing. Instead I think users will be arriving at sites by clicking on links in emails, search and social. Where can I find data / research to back me up?
Search Behavior | | TomCritchlow0