Two sites, two domains, two brands, 98% same content
-
There are two affiliated brick & mortar retail stores moving into e-commerce. For non-marketing reasons separate e-commerce websites are desired.
The two brands are based in separate (nearby) cities in the same Canadian province.
Although the store name and branding will be different, the content on the site will either be near duplicates or exact duplicates.
The more I look into this on Google and SEOmoz QA, the more I am concerned about the SEO implications of this.
SEOmoz QA: Multiple cities/regions websites - duplicate content?
"So, yes, because you are offering the same services at second location, you are thinking correctly about the need to rewrite all content so it's not a duplicate of site #1."
Duplicate content - Webmaster Tools Help
"However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic… In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.
...
Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results."
Unfortunately, I would say there's very little chance that rewritten content will happen in the foreseeable future.
With that said, I'd be greatly appreciative of the concerns and remedies that the SEOmoz community has to offer (even if they're for future use). Thanks in advance.
-
If you had a legitimate purpose you could try using encoding but I'm not sure how this falls within Googles guidelines you would need to check. From experience with similar issues I've found that anything up to about 60% duplicate will rank.
-
You won't be able to have both sites ranking in Google if you've got duplicate content. One of them will be flagged with Panda and will plummet to page 10 or lower on the SERPS.
Now, if you don't necessarily need people to find one of these sites via Google, you can still have duplicate content. It would be ideal to have the home pages be unique. Then, for the inner pages, use a rel-canonical tag to tell Google which of the websites should be included in the index for these two duplicate pages.
The other option is to apply a noindex meta tag to the duplicated pages on one of the sites. However, the canonical option is better.
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
-
Canonical URL's For Two Domains
We have two websites, one we use for Google PPC (website 1) and one (website 2) we use for everything else. The reason is we are in an industry that Google Adwords doesn't like, so we built a whole other website that removes the product descriptions as Google Adwords doesn't approve of many of them (nutrition). Right now we have that Google Adwords approved website (website 1) no-index/no-follow because we didn't want to run into potential duplicate content issues in free search, but the issue is we can't submit it to Google Shopping...as they require it to be indexable. Do you think removing the no-index/no-follow from that website 1 and adding canonical URL's pointing to website 2 would resolve this issue (being able to submit it to Google Shopping) and not cause any problems with duplicate content? I was thinking of adding the canonical tag to all pages of website 1 and point it to website 2. Does that make sense? Do you think that would work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Merging Two Sites: Need Help!
I have two existing e-commerce sites. The older one, is built on the Yahoo platform and had limitations as far as user experience. The new site is built on the Magento 2 platform. We are going to be using SLI search for our search and navigation on the new Magento platform. SLI wants us to 301 all of our categories to the hosted category pages they will create, that will have a URL structure akin to site.com/shop/category-name.html. The issue is: If I want to merge the two sites, I will have to do a 301 to the category pages of the new site, which will have 301s going to the category pages hosted by SLI. I hope this makes sense! The way I see it, I have two options: Do a 301 from the old domain to categories of the new domain, and have the new domain's categories 301 to the SLI categories; or, I can do my 301s directly to the SLI hosted category pages. The downside of #1 is that I will be doing two 301s, and I know I will lose more link juice as a result. The upside of #1, is that if decide not to use SLI in the future, it is one less thing to worry about. The downside of #2, is that I will be directing all the category pages from the old site to a site I do not ultimately control. I appreciate any feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KH20171 -
Question about moving content from one site to another without a 301
I could use a second opinion about moving content from some inactive sites to my main site. Once upon a time, we had a handful of geotargeted websites set up targeting various cities that we serve. This was in addition to our main site, which was mostly targeted to our primary office and ranked great for those keywords. Our main site has plenty of authority, has been around for ages, etc. We built out these geo-targeted sites with some good landing pages and kept them active with regularly scheduled blog posts which were unique and either interesting or helpful. Although we had a little success with these, we eventually saw the light and realized that our main site was strong enough to rank for these cities as well, which made life a whole lot easier, not to mention a lot less spammy. We've got some good content on these other sites that I'd like to use on our main site, especially the blog posts. Now that I've got it through my head that there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand that I could just start moving this content over so long as I put a 301 redirect in place where the content used to be on these old sites. Which leads me to my question. Our SEO was careful not to have these other websites pointing to our main site to avoid looking like we were trying to do something shady from a link building perspective. His concern is that these redirects would undermine that effort and having a bunch of redirects from a half dozen sites could end up hurting us somehow. Do you think that is the case? What he is suggesting we do is remove all of the content that we'd like to use and use Webmaster Tools to request that this content be removed from the index. Then, after the sites have been recrawled, we'll check for ourselves to confirm they've been removed and proceed with using the content however we'd like. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
Need some expert help – My Client bought out competitor and now wants to completely duplicate the current site with the same stock & categories using the Competitor brand
I am the SEO consultant for a large online homewares store. This company currently ranks very well in Google. I can PM the domain name if anyone needs however i don't want to post it on this forum. The company has bought out a competitor and plan to use the same warehouse, same products, and same back-end system as the current site, so they want to completely duplicate the current website. Titles, meta descriptions, product descriptions will all be renamed/rewritten/reworded (however keep in mind there are not many ways to reword a 3 piece saucepan set) Pricing will mostly be the same (some difference though), images cannot be renamed, categories cannot be renamed... the structure of the site will be exactly the same... placement etc. (however will have different banners, logo etc.) I personally don't believe the new site will rank, because it will be too similar. Can someone please offer me a 2nd opinion... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanlenton0 -
Redirecting a Page from Domain A to Domain B
We have a page on Domain A, an established and well-ranking website, that would be more appropriate on Domain B, a site that we launched about two years ago. This page ranks well, pulls nice search traffic and has traffic from external links. We would like to move the page and its traffic from Domain A to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Have you ever done this or have you heard of how it has worked for someone else? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
Wordpress.com content feeding into site's subdomain, who gets SEO credit?
I have a client who had created a Wordpress.com (not Wordpress.org) blog, and feeds blog posts into a subdomain blog.client-site.com. My understanding was that in terms of SEO, Wordpress.com would still get the credit for these posts, and not the client, but I'm seeing conflicting information. All of the posts are set with permalinks on the client's site, such as blog.client-site.com/name-of-post, and when I run a Google site:search query, all of those individual posts appear in the Google search listings for the client's domain. Also, I've run a marketing.grader.com report, and these same results are seen. Looking at the source code on the page, however, I see this information which leads me to believe the content is being credited to, and fed in from, Wordpress.com ('client name' altered for privacy): href="http://client-name.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster.jpeg">class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-2050" title="Could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster" src="http://client-name.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster.jpeg?w=150&h=143" I'm looking to provide a recommendation to the client on whether they are ok to continue moving forward with this current setup, or whether we should port the blog posts over to a subfolder on their primary domain www.client-site.com/blog and use Wordpress.org functionality, for proper SEO. Any advice?? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
Redirecting Existing Domains to My Main Site
Hi I have a main property related website featuring different countries around the world. I also have many different seperate country websites 20+. All keyword rich domains with a good 9 years+ domain age and PR3's with decent links and moz rankings and unique content. Many of the sites are very low Alexa rank now and receive little traffic. I don't have the time now to spend on each of the individual domains and am wanting to consolidate them and their PR juice to the corresponding country page of my main website. My question is - is it possible - will google see this as me trying to manipulate them and is my main site likely to suffer from any penalties or downgrading? Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freecall0 -
New Domain Name For Site That Ranks Highly on Key Terms
Here's my problem -- which is actually a pretty good problem to have. My client is a speciality service provider in an extremely competitive field. It charges 3 to 5 times what others do for providing a super-premium level of service. It doesn't have -- nor does it want -- many customers. I can't go into details, but let's just say the business model is a bit like the charity or premium newsletter publishing model. It is extremely hard to recruit new members -- but once recruited, members tend to stay for a long time at high price points. Personal referral is key. As result of my efforts over the last 90 days, the client's SEO results have skyrocketed. After a couple of false starts, we have focussed on key terms the target demographic is likely to search, rather than the generic terms others in the industry use. We have also had great success with a social media strategy -- since the few people likely to be interested in paying such high prices know like-minded folks. For the first time, my client is getting "walk in" prospects. They are delighted! But they are not really walk-ins. They have already found the site -- either through SERPs or Facebook or Twitter. Now we need to get to the next level. Here's the problem: the client's domain name sucks. It is short, but combines an acronym with one of the words in its long-version name. It uses the British spelling version of the long name fragment, even though most Canadians now use American spelling. And it is a .ca, rather than a dot.com So I think we have to bite the bullet and change to the long, dot com version of the name, which is available and has the additional benefit of having embedded within it a key search term. I am basically an editorial/content guy and not a tech guy. The IT guys at my firm are strongly encouraging me to make the change...in very "colorful" language. We can certainly do 301 redirects at the page level. But I would like some additional validation before proceeding. My questions are: how much link juice might we lose? I've seen the figure of 10% bandied around. Is it accurate? might we see a temporary dip in results? If so, how long would it last? what questions did I forget to ask? What additional info do you need to offer informed advice ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielFreedman0