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
-
How to set up a competitor URL with a language slug for a campaign
Hello, I am trying to set up a competitor with language slug for my (subfolder) website with a language slug. Let's say my website is something like: websiteholding.com/de/website
Competitive Research | | Siir
My competitor is: competitor.com/de When I go to Campaign Settings > Comptetitor Sites > type in competitor.com/de > Hit Save Competitor > Then it shows the saved competitor without the language slug as competitor.com I am not sure if this is a correct method of tracking since for my DE website I would like to track the DE page of the competitor, not their global page. Please correct me if I am wrong and help me out on possible solutions? I am quite new to SEO & Moz , so any help on the topic would be appreciated.0 -
The same page ranking twice in the top 10?
Whilst doing a SERP analysis for a particular phrase, i noticed that the same page is ranking twice in the top 10. I've known of the same domain ranking twice with different pages which makes sense but to see the exact same URL ranking twice is a new one for me. Has anyone seen this before too and know of reasons why this would happen?
Competitive Research | | jamiemonteathaegon0 -
What's the difference between 'external links' and 'linking domains to this domain' in my report?
I'm looking at a competitor analysis report. The number provided for 'external links' is 150. The number for 'external links to this domain' is 4860 and 'linking domains to this domain' is 232. What are the differences between these numbers?
Competitive Research | | lthompsonon0 -
Why does the link analysis of my website say I have no links?
When I click on the "Link Analysis" tab it says my website has a domain authority of 1 and has 0's for every other category. When I run it in Open Site Explorer - it says I have a page authority of 51 with over 4600 links. My website also seems to be at a stand still over the past several weeks. Anyone know why the two Link Analysis is not showing anything? Thank you
Competitive Research | | tyler7560 -
Competitive Domain Analysis
What is the best way to improve this in reference to my competition? My site(s) are formatted well, returning no errors or warnings. I have removed my keyword meta-tag and tested my sites against the keywords that we want to appear under. Now I need to close the gap on the competition.
Competitive Research | | bobbabuoy0 -
Site Ranks Better than Comp...but why?
My site is ranking better than some of the competition sites even though the Moz Rank and Moz Trust are lower, anyone know why?
Competitive Research | | CalgaryRealtor390 -
Domain name advice please
Hi i am trying to work out what is the best when it comes to domain names. What i mean is, should you go short or should you try and fit in what you need. So as follows. say i need a domain name that i wanted to buy which i have done research and found that these two words together are good keywords. please note that this is an example the two keywords are manchester airport and the next two keywords are cheap flights should i get a domain name that say manchesterairportcheapflights or should i have a shorter domain name like manchester cheap flights or another example say i wanted a domain name that fitted the following two keywords in manchester hotels budget accomodation should i just get a domain name that says manchester hotels or should it get the following manchesterhotelsbudgetaccomodation I am looking at buying a number of domain names and i am trying to find out if shorter is better or if a longer domain name is better
Competitive Research | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Is there a tool that will tell me how many visitors per day a website receives?
Hey guys, I am new to SEOMoz and have setup my first campaign, so far very impressed with what is possible. However I am trying to find out how much traffic a website is getting, as I know that people can be high up on certain keywords but are not actually generating any traffic from them. Can anyone help? Also I have a potential client who is ranking really high on alexa because of its american traffic, yet when I asked them they get very few bookings from americans. How can I view the UK ranking of the site? Thanks Andy
Competitive Research | | iprosoftware0