1 site on 2 domains (interesting situation, expert advice needed)
-
Dear all,
i have read many posts about having one content on 2 different domains, how to combine those two to avoid duplicate content. However the story of my two domains makes this question really difficult.
Domain 1: chillispot.org ( http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=chillispot.org )
The original site was on this domain, started 9 years ago. That time the owner of the domain was not me. The site was very popular with lots of links to it. Then after 5 years of operation, the site closed. I have managed to save the content to:
Domain 2: chillispot.info ( http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=chillispot.info )
The content i put there was basically the same. Many links were changed to chillispot.info on external sites when they noticed the change. But lots of links are still unchanged and pointing to .ord domain. The .info is doing well in search engines (for example for keyword 'chillispot').
Now i managed to buy the original chillispot.org domain. As you can see the domain authority of the .org domain is still higher than the .info one and it has more valuable links.
Question is: what would be the best approach to offer content on both domains without having penalized by google for duplicated content? Which domain should we keep the content on? The original .org one, which is still a better domain but not working for several years or the .info one who has the content for several years now and doing well on search engines?
And then, after we decide this, what would be the best approach to send users to the real content?
Thanks for the answers!
-
Ok we are trying this approach. We have set up the 301 redirection for all URLs from .info as the content is exactly the same on .org.
We will see how it will work.
About your side note: all links were created by users of the site, we didnt do any link building strategy yet. It seems they are all using the brand keyword to link from us.
Thanks for your suggestion.
-
Sounds like a complex situation, but it really isn't all that hard to discern. This is the approach I would take on the matter. Looking over the initial MOZ Explorer crawl data, it's a close call for sure.
1. First, the old .org domain, which you just recently re-acquired still has old links pointing to it and good value.
2. The .info domains still don't have or generate as much 'trust and authority' as other TLD's like .com, .ca, .org. I would seriously consider moving back to the .org TLD.
3. Any links you haven't been able to switch over or have little to no control over (and would take a ton of time and resources to have switched over to the .info domain). Redirect all the pages, and the link values being passed will still count when pooled to the new .org domain. Value will still stand, even losing some value in the 301.
4. If you do decide to use the .org domain, make sure to plan out a seriously detailed 301 redirect plan (TLD, sub domains/folders and all pages) when looking to move and migrate data over to the older .org domain. Not taking the time to plan this out would cause very negative ripples in your current and future SEO endeavors
This is a very careful area, but needs to be watched carefully.
5. Avoid running both sites side by side. This will surely cause duplicate content issues. Choose 1 domain, redirect all the other value, content, etc through 301's, canonical's and migration procedures and have all the value sitting within one site. Build your marketing, social and search platform around one site/brand and work from there
On a side note looking at your linking data from OSE:
Your actual main text linking revolves around your brand name almost 80-90% of the time, which isn't all bad, but you might want to start looking at alternative ways to generate links to your site, using some of your product descriptions and through content generation. Try to vary the amount of links and types of link test being used to link to you from other sites. Don't sculpt your links, but rather include ways to evolve your current linking practices.
Hope some of this input helps!
-
Jesse said what I would said.
-
Yes. As Kurt said the DA and link-juice will carry over via 301 redirects meaning whichever site is redirected will benefit the site that it's redirecting to. If I were you I'd redirect to the site that's currently being ranked well in Google as this will limit any fluctuation you may have in the SERPs. Even though the other domain has a longer legacy, if it isn't currently being listed in SERPs for your target keyword then you might be waiting awhile for the whole thing to propagate and sort itself out.
Hope this helps.
-
Thanks for the answer.
From google's point of view the .org domain is older and it had the original content first. Does that count?
"Just redirect one domain to the other and combine the sites."
If i redirect, will the .info site be stronger from google's point of view?
-
I would choose one domain to go with instead of keeping content on two. From what you've said, you don't really need two sites, you are just thinking about having two sites because of domain authority. Just redirect one domain to the other and combine the sites. If both sites already have the same content, then try to redirect each page to its corresponding page, if possible. That will make for an easier transition. Using 301 redirects will pass the authority from the redirected domain/pages to the other domain, increasing it's authority.
As for which domain to keep, I'd go with the one that's getting the most user traffic. From what you've said, it sounds like that is the .info site.
By combining the sites, you won't have to worry about an approach for sending people to the "real" content. There will only be one place for the content and it will (hopefully) all be real. You'll also be able to focus all your attention to building up the one site instead of spitting your efforts.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com
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
-
Setting country specific top level domain as alias - will site benefit from TLDs authority?
I have a host of sites that follow a top level domain strategy. For each local site they will be on the top level domain but with their country-languages prefix as the subdirectory. Such as below: example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gracejo
example.com/uk-en
example.com/sg-en
example.com/de-de Each local site being on the TLD will benefit them in terms of SEO and it makes it easier to have one strategy. My question however, if the Netherlands comes on board, they would generally have example.com/nl-en. However they want their primary domain as examplenetherlands.nl and the TLD (example.com/nl-en) set as an alias/secondary domain that redirects to the primary. Will they benefit from any SEO if the TLD is not the primary address?0 -
Dividing my catalog into 2 different sites.
Hi, We are a wholesaler for electronics parts and accessories on our main site Our Business for parts is more B2B. Accessories is more B2C oriented. Right now, our catalog is not the best SEO Friendly kind. We want to move all accesories to a new site. Now. So as not to get duplicated content, and user experience, I guess the best is remove all category pages and product pages from our main site. That would generate lots of 404. What would be the way to handle this as we are talking about hundreds, maybe thousands of pages ? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kepass0 -
Consolidating Multiple Domains into A Single Domain
I have a client who's website is an amalgamation of multiple domains. jacksonhole.net is the main domain but the site passes traffic back and forth from the following domains/sites. My questions is, would it it be better for SEO to consolidate all of these domains under the single high authority domain and 301 redirect the rest or is that a really bad idea? Thanks for your help. jacksonhole.net (Domain Authority 31) jackson-hole-rental-condos.com (Domain Authority 22) jackson-hole-rental-homes.com (Domain Authority 21) j acksonholehotelguide.com (Domain Authority 19)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbaxa-2613381 -
I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2\. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect?
I'm going through the crawl report and it says I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2/ Now, the author/admin/page/2 I can't even find in WordPress, but it is the same thing as blog/page/2 nonetheless. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect it to blog/page/2?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shift-inc0 -
Domain.com/postname vs. Domain.com/blog/postname
I am wondering what is the best practice regarding blogs? I read that it would be best to structure a website like a pyramide instead of a flat panckage But I have seen many blogs where the post shows right after the domain name. Domain.com/postname instead of Domains/blog/postname My point is that if a website has many post then the structure will get very flat and this will maybe make your most optimized and important pages less important to google domain.com/page a) What do you think about this, which one of the two blog solutions do you prefer and why? b) in context to blog If for instance you had a keyword like Copenhagen property would you then consider renaming your blog to realetateagent.com/Copenhagen-property-news/post-name c) Would write a little intro like 200 words for the page 1 of your blog and add in some keywords.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nm19770 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Need advice on 301 domain redirection
Hello friends, We have two sites namely spiderman-example.com & avengers-example.com which sells the same product listed out under similar categories, since we are about to stop or put down the site “avengers-example.com” because we just want to concentrate in bringing up a single brand called spiderman-example.com. “Spiderman-example” has comparatively more visitors and conversion rates than ''avengers-example'' ie. 90 % more traffic and conversion. Avengers-example has a small fraction of loyal customers who still search for the brand-name & there are a hand-full of potential keywords those ranking on its own. So is it advisable to redirect Avengers-example to spiderman-example using 301-redirect? Will this help to gain any link-juice from Avengers-example? If so how can we effectively redirect between two domain’s with minimal loss in page authority & linkjuice to enhance ''spiderman-example''? Off beat:These names "Avengers" and "Spiderman" were just used as an example but the actual site names has no relation to the ones mentioned above.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | semvibe0 -
I need some blogging advice please!
My name is Matthew and I am a new PRO member and founder of my own Internet marketing company in KS. So far I love the interaction and tools and functionality of seomoz. I am a true student of seo and love the subject. My dilemma is I know a blog is an important piece of any good seo campaign but I know very little about HOW to blog well......this is my new site and blog page. I only have a couple articles so far but many more planned. http://sawwebmarketing.com/seo-blog/ When I read an article that would be particuarly beneficial for my visitors can i post or share that on MY blog (giving the author the credit of course) without google thinking its duplicate content? is there anything specific I need to do with my blog for google to "see" the new, fresh content that is being added to the site? I have seen "tagged" items at the bottom of some blogs. Is this important? Some blogs will have a word or string of 2-3 words that are a link to a specific website. Does this help me or just them or just people reading the blog? **All I know is articles I write need to be relevant to my site and interesting and ORIGINAL and of benefit to my site visitors. ** Any advice that would help insure my blog articles get me all the juice they can would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you in advance! Matthew ps - my site only went live a couple days ago so I am still working on a few onpage items but ANY feedback about the site itself would be spectacular! Have a GREAT weekend!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mrupp440