3 Sites Covering Similar Topics & Panda

[Bergerlaw]

My question will take a bit of explaining, so here goes:

I have 3 blogs on the same server:

1.  personal finance blog;

2.  credit card blog;

3.  prepaid credit card blog.

The personal finance blog is my flagship site started in 2007, which feeds my family and pays the mortgage.  By contrast, the other two sites (started in 2008 and 2010) I would gladly kill if the result would help my personal finance blog.

In the fall of 2010 (before Panda) the prepaid card blog was penalized by Google.  This has been confirmed by Google in response to a reconsideration request.  Of course, they don't say why.  I've tried a number of things and resubmitted the site, but with no luck.

Both the personal finance blog and credit card blog were hit by Panda 2 (April 11, 2011) and have not recovered.

While the personal finance site covers many topics (e.g., investing, credit, debt, money management), its income comes largely from credit cards.  We review individual credit cards and have pages that list cards by category (e.g., balance transfer, cash back, travel).

The credit card blog does the same thing, but of course covers credit cards in more depth.  There is a similar overlap between the prepaid card blog on the one hand, and the credit card blog and personal finance blog on the other.  However, all content is unique.

I do not currently link between the sites, although until a few months ago I had blogroll links between the sites and a few (less than 10) content links.

If you've made it this far (and I hope you have), here are my questions:

1.  Could the existence of the credit card and prepaid credit card sites be hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in Google, whether via Panda or otherwise?

2.  If there is a reasonable chance that the answer to question 1 is yes, what would you suggest I do?

Of course, I could just take down the sites, but I wonder if there are other options.

One thought I had was to deindex the two card sites (I assume I can do this by disallowing googlebot via robots.txt) and give it time.  Would Google treat this as if the sites did not exist?  Both sites get a fair amount of traffic from bing and yahoo, so this option appeals to me.  Of course, for all I know the existence of the two card sites are hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in bing and yahoo, too.

I thought about selling the sites, but if they are hurting my personal finance site, I grow concerned about how google distinguishes between a site being sold and a webmaster just trying to make the sites look like they are owned by different people.  In this regard, I've never tried to hide the common ownership of the sites and have no intention of doing that now.

If I kill the sites, should I redirect them to my personal finance site?  For the penalized prepaid card site, this seems both risky and unhelpful.  But perhaps redirecting the credit card site is an option.

Given that the personal finance site is my livelihood, I greatly appreciate your thoughts on my dilemma.

[ChrisDyson]

I don't think the relationship of your other sites is having any effect on your rankings but it maybe Google post Panda is showing syndicated versions of your content as the most relevant. Finance and Making money online are very competitive niches and scraping/syndication is rife.

I recommend that you firstly make sure that when you publish your blog posts you are pinging pubsubhubbub to make sure Google knows you are the originating source.

Two questions:

Which landing pages and keywords have seen the biggest traffic change in the past 6-12 months?

Have you checked your competitor and your own link profiles for any recent changes ?

[Bergerlaw]

I don't think the content is duplicated, apart from some scrapers.  I deal with the scrapers when I can, but I have to believe that the canonical tag and publication date take care of any issues.

As I said, I don't link between the sites anymore.  I've had several people suggest that I move them to separate servers and even "hide" affiliate links by using redirects contained in folders that are blocked from search engines.

Maybe I'm naive here, but if I have to hide what I'm doing from search engines, I just don't do it.

[Bergerlaw]

Alan, appreciate the response.  The more I think about it, I have to agree with your conclusion.  There are plenty of companies that own multiple sites in the same vertical.  It's well known, for example, that Bankrate owns creditcards.com and bankaholic.  Each of these sites covers credit cards in depth.

[AlanMosley]

I know what is like when you have a problem and can not find an aswer you start to see every thing as a potental cause, but I dont think it the other sites have anything to do with it.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I always look at these things the same...

If you have more than one site linking to other sites, ensure they are on a different server. OK, perhaps I am being overly cautious here, but knowing what Google can be like, I would not take chances.

If there are no links between the sites, then as long as the content is unique (as you say it is), then you have no problems from a duplication point of view. If each site serves a different purpose, there should be no problems.

I would need to look at the sites to get an idea why Panda hit them - there are so many possibilites. The main ones as we know though were thin or duplicate content and adverts.

Is there a possibility your content has been duplicated somewhere else?

Andy