Competitor Ranking High has 2 Domains, But Duplicate Website ?
-
I was using OSE and noticed all the backlinks to one of our competitors is there other domain name, which is the EXACT SAME website. You can enter both url's and they display the same content. They are not useing any canonical tags either. Why are they not penalized for duplicate content? And for using there own website for backlinks ? We try to do everything right, but still cannot beat them.
Any thoughts on this?
-
Your competitors obviously knew what they were doing. This is what many would call Black Hat SEO, and while it can provide some good results in the short term, it's shady activity.
SEO should never be about gaming the SERPs. It should be about providing useful signals to search engines to tell them how to rank your pages.
Companies that do this type of stuff are only hurting themselves in the long run. I firmly believe if you continue to use solid white hat SEO techniques you'll come out on top of all of the gamers out there in the end.
Crime only pays until you get caught.
-
I can share a personal experience that might help clarify how the duplicate site issue works.
My site contains a sitemap which is automatically updated each day. When the new sitemap is created, Google and Bing are pinged. I also have a backup job scheduled to run daily. It is a perfectly standardized setup.
I wanted to do some testing with my site, so I restored my most recent backup to www.mydomain.com/test. The /test site was an exact duplicate of my domain. My lack of forethought was quite costly.
The /test site generated a sitemap, pinged the search engines, and was listed. In retrospect, I should have turned off the sitemap job and blocked the /test site in robots.txt. Worse, I didn't catch my error for over a month. While doing a search I noticed the result took me to the test site. After some troubleshooting I realized the error.
Bottom line, anyone can run two sites with identical information. The problem is that both sites will get listed. So if you have a 100 page site which is duplicated, then Site A might have pages 1 - 50 listed, and site B might have pages 51 - 100 listed. The problem is your domain authority is split between the two sites.
Ultimately the problem is fixed by 301'ing one site to the other. When that happens you will lose some link juice due to the 301.
Your competitor can rank well on both sites. But the same page wont rank well on both sites. Only one of the duplicated pages will appear in the SERP.
-
I believe that you are lucky that they run two websites. The reason... they have gotten backlinks into both of those domains instead of focusing ALL of their backlinks into a single domain. That divides their power instead of concentrating it.
So, I don't worry about competitors who think that they are going to build five websites in the same niche to kickass on me. Let them do it, divide their energy, divide their time and divide the backlinks.
I will start sweating when they redirect all of their satellite sites to the homesite.
-
Hey, the other site may well show up on a site:example.com query, but that does not mean it is ranking for key terms. Equally, it may seem that they are getting equity from the links, they may even be getting some, but I would suggest there is likely something else at play here.
It's practically impossible to give you a more definitive answer without the URL though. Happy to take a look if you want to private message it to me on here.
Marcus
-
Whoops. Actually they both appear in google that way but the cached domain is there main domain. Does that mean that it is parked?
-
Wait! But when I do site:example.com/ in google . both websites are still being picked up.
-
I would rather not. Private email possibly.
-
Your right. Actually Last year they both ranked, now I am only seeing there main website. But I still do not understand why if they were doing that, why were they not affected by that? I am bugged by this because it seems like they are receiving a lot of power from there backlinks which is there domain that is no longer ranking.
-
Can you provide the sites? It's pretty hard to tell without looking at them.
-
I used to have a few competitors who ran multiple identical sites - all linking to one another.
Today just one site remains. Duplicates are filtered from the SERPs.
My bet is that these competitors will have just one site in the SERPs by this time next year.
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
-
Competitor ranks high, but how?
On our campaign, I have three local competitors which I like to keep an eye on. Two have been around for years but the other is pretty new. According to Moz, he has a Domain Authority of 1, has no backlinks and ranks lower on every keyword I keep track of. How then is he getting ahead of us for certain search terms? Can Moz not give any more information?
Competitive Research | | robandsarahgillespie0 -
Traffic Data for Competitor Subdomain
Does anyone know of a way to get monthly visitor data for a subdomain that I do not manage? I would normally use SEMRush or Compete, but they only provide domain level data.
Competitive Research | | dsinger0 -
Localized SERP Rankings - Multiple Questions...
The Google SERPs for my keywords are pretty regional. We are in the "IT Support Company" space. I've checked with friends in other parts of the country, and we don't show up in the SERPs in other parts of the country for KWs that we are ranking for locally. Questions: 1. I see both national and local players showing up in the SERPs. Is there any kind of formula for how Google decides who gets on the first page? 2. Some of my keywords trigger Google+ listings. How long does it take to show up in Google+, assuming we're optimized appropriately, and we have earned a placement? 3. For Moz's keyword ranking tool, how does it handle regional searches? Moz's tool is going to show different KW rankings than what I will see. My immediate concerns are rankings in my area (NY Metro), but we want to go national. How do we track rankings in different areas? 4. Is it possible to be on the 1st page with Google+ and Organic listings? 5. Do the Google+ 7 packs have generally better, or worse CTRs than similarly placed organic listings?
Competitive Research | | CsmBill0 -
My (properly optimised) webpage outscores page#1 ranked competitors on page/domain authority ... but I'm only on page#2\. Huh?
I'm puzzled. I've optimised a particular page for a particular search term, and the SEOMoz tool gives me an A for on-page optimisation. So no problem there. I can understand why my webpage/site is being outranked by pages from (for example) the Guardian and Oxford University, but there are several sites that Google is ranking on page #1 though their page and domain scores are well below ours. Specifically: my page/domain authority scores are 46/52, compared with 22/46 for the competitor that Google is ranking #5 - yet we only rank a lowly #12. And it's not as though the particular page in question isn't an obvious and appropriate part of our site. We work with new writers and the page in question offers a selection of creative writing courses. It's not like we're a writing-related site that suddenly has a page advertising fake rolexes. It's not a timing issue either, as most of our links have been in place for a couple of years at least. So I'm puzzled. And concerned. This page of ours was a reliable revenue generator for us and it's dying out there on the page#2 wilderness. If anyone can help, I'd be massively grateful. I don't know if this is helpful, but the page in question is http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/Creative-Writing-Courses.html and the search term is ... well, heck, you take a wild guess. We're a British firm, so the only search engine that really matters to us is google.co.uk
Competitive Research | | harrybingham0 -
Ranking better with worse figures
Six months ago a competitor e-commerce site appeared in the top 10. Now six months later he is at #2. (for the main keyword in my sector in Dutch language, competition +4 million) My site is 4 years old and since three years ranks at #1 or 2. I'm now at #3, behind the competitors site. My competitor has a HomePage PA of 36 with 2295 links from 26 domains, root domain DA 23 with 175000 links from 30 domains. My site has a HomePage PA of 49 with 6975 links froms 238 domains, root domain DA 40 with 310023 links from 269 domains. I have more specific landing pages, better and more content, code W3C checked .... Can somebody explain why a younger site with worse figures gets a better position in Google ranking?
Competitive Research | | noordhout0 -
Is there a SEO Moz Competitor Analasys tool that will show me how many Vistors their site receives?
I'm trying to find out how much traffic a competitor gets. Is there an SEOmoz tool for this?
Competitive Research | | starkSEO0 -
How does TTH have only 220 Domain Backlinks?
Was looking at these guys today http://www.tentonhammer.com/ One of the orginal games websites, an authority in its niche and 7 years old (about as long as that niche has existed) Its all unique, high quality content but it has a only 220 linking domains, including BBC etc It doesnt make any sense to me that this website should have so few linking domains. Anyone have a thought as to whats going on here? S
Competitive Research | | firstconversion0 -
Sometime I just don't get Google rankings
We currently rate #10 on google.com.au on Modern Cloth Nappies and the #4 site is a dead link to a page http://www.modernclothnappies.org/ who's total content is: Index of / <address>Apache Server at www.modernclothnappies.org Port 80</address> <address></address> <address>They have been at that rank for a quiet a while and even the cached version is full of broken links.</address> <address></address> <address>It seems Google is quick to jump on low value sites or ones with duplicate content, but what about stale links and sites? Has anyone else had similar experiences of being out ranked by domant or dead sites?</address>
Competitive Research | | oznappies0