Does running 2 domains from the same website harm my seo efforts?
-
Hi
I run a website which has 2 domains running from it. One domain has a .co.uk extension and shows products aimed at the UK market. The other domain is a .com which shows products aimed at the US market.
As both domains run from the same website, the content is mostly identical APART from the product listings as they change depending upon whether you're in the UK or US.
My reason for doing is this mainly for paid search purposes as I can have a more accurate domain depending upon which country I target. Both sites are set to encourage the bots to index it, and in google WMT each domain is targeted to its specific country.
So, my questions are,
-
Is this set-up possibly damaging my SEO efforts for either or both websites?
-
If so, would setting one domain to no-index, improve SEO efforts for the other?
Thanks in advance for any replies!
Cheers
Joe
-
-
Thank you, you're most welcome.
-
Thanks again, a brilliant reply, and I'll action those suggestions immediately!
-
You're welcome Joe.
Regarding those links that you mention; they could potentially cause an issue such as link spamming, which can happen when two websites send each other a lot of reciprocal links.
(Simpler solution towards the end) ~ My advice would be to remove them and make it clear on the website that those on the UK site, in the US, can visit the US site and vice versa.
As some landing pages will no doubt be deep pages (i.e. not the homepage) perhaps a widget type of box in a prominent position would help to direct visitors to the other site if they are on the wrong site at the time. EG. "If you're a visitor from the US then visit our site especially for our US customers" or such like.
With some clever coding (and use of nofollow for such links) you could get it to work that when clicked on, the visitor goes to the corresponding page on the other site.
Or alternatively, an easier solution, make sure that all those links are "nofollow" links so that search spiders don't follow them, reducing the risk of a penalty.
Regards
Simon
-
Thanks very much for the response Simon.
I have links between both .co.uk and .com websites on every page on my site so you can check products from either country perspective, therefore google WMT shows lots of backlinks from the alternative domain, do you think this could cause a problem as well?
Thanks
Joe
-
Do more to differentiate them insofar as it's possible. Interview people from different countries for the respective sites, for example.
-
Hi Joe
A good question. You'll find most of your answer in a video by Matt Cutts at Google http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo
As you are running different Top Level Domains (TLDs) then chances are that your websites and content won't be classed as duplicate, however saying that, if they are both hosted in the same country, e.g. the UK, then potentially they could be classed as duplicate, with only one of them showing up in search results.
Your best bet would be to Host the .co.uk in the UK and the .com in the US. That way, it's more likely that neither site would be classed as duplicate.
Regards
Simon
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks1 -
Country and Language tags-Running an SEO audit on a site that definitely has more than one language, but nothing is pulling up. I don't quite understand href lang or how to go about it. HELP HELP!
Ran an SEO audit and I don't really understand country and language tags. For example, sony.com definitely has more than one language, but how do I seo check href lang ? Do I inspect the page? etc?
Technical SEO | | Mindgruver0 -
Website not crawled
i added website www.nsale.in in add campaign, it shows only 1 page crawled. but its working fine for other sites, any idea why it failed ?
Technical SEO | | Dhinesh0 -
Help Website Plumetting :(
Hi I have been smacked by the penguin/panda and traffic plumetted back in April/May. We are still trying to recover and am looking at all of the potential issues. I have since cleaned up the site as much as i can and attempted to remove as much duplicate content as possible which is automatically generated by Zencart. We add content regularly and have new product reviews everyday and all product page are kept fresh as they show the last 12 customers engraving details which change daily on popular items. Could someone give me some pointers as i am hitting my head against the wall and only seeing traffic drop all the time, it's soul destroying just how much work i am putting into this every day without any effect. Site is www.keepitpersonal.co.uk Kind Regards Andy
Technical SEO | | SmithyWhiffy0 -
2 similar websites targetting different countries
I have a website that has a .com.au extension running on zencart. If I load up the exact same wesbite (with the same website name) on the .com, will my .com.au be penalised by Google? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | theshining0 -
Redirecting Parked Domain
I just recently switched hosting. We have 3 domains and 1 being the main domain. Right now they are set up as parked domains. Can I redirect the parked domains under my main websites .htaccess file ? I am just worried that good we will get hit for duplicate content, even though technically the content is only on our main domain. right now if I type in my parked domains in Google, they appear in search. The site is all hand coded and not using a CMS.
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Can I do a redirect to a new domain name only a couple of weeks after having redirected to another domain?
I have a client with two website with very similar content. Both had a lot of inbound links and performed fairly well in SERPS. We recently combined both sites and have redirected one of the domains to the other. The traffic dipped slightly initially, but is recovering nicely. Now the client registered a new domain name he would like to use for the site. Should I wait a few weeks for everything to settle down after the first redirect/consolidation of sites before doing a new redirect to a new domain name, or should I not worry about having any issues with doing it right away?
Technical SEO | | Drewco0 -
Why Google did not index our domain?
Hi, We launched tmart 60 days ago and submitted to google, bing, yahoo 20 days later. But google had never indexed our website still when yahoo indexed it in one week. What we have checked or tried: 1. We got 20~50 inlinks in one month and now 81 inlinks via yahoo site explorer. 2. This domain has registered for 13 years and we purchased it from sedo last year. We
Technical SEO | | zt673
did not find any problems from domain archive pages. 3. Page similar: the homepage is 50% similar to one of our competitors when we just launched.
So we adjusted the page structure and modified the content one month later and decreased the similarity to 30% (by tools from webconfs.com) 4. Google Robots: googlebot crawled our website every day after we submitted for indexing.
We opened GWT account for it and added the xml sitemap last week. GWT said nothing
was wrong except the time of page loading. Our questions: Why google did not indexed our website? What should we do? Thanks, wu0