Two sites with different URLs
-
I help organize an ecommerce site for a company that is named after the state that the company was founded in (ex: Florida Pipes). Our programmer is thinking about creating a duplicate site that would have a name that was more location agnostic so people shopping on the site would not think that they may be ordering from far away hence incurring extra shipping charges. He said that the site would only have a different URLs, name and homepage but would link to all of the same stuff that is on the site that is up now. He said that there would be no way to tell (possibly for the layperson) that the two sites were related. Is this a good practice? Would we be penalized in search results for having two URLs linking to the same content? (We are a 30 year old company that ranks very high for our main keyword)
Thank you for your input!
-
Good points. With the limited knowledge of SEO and ecommerce, I really do not think it's a good idea. I personally think that we just need to concentrate more on the site we do have and polish it up. Thank you for the response.
-
It is my opinion that no, this wouldn't really benefit you much. You could possibly have duplicate content issues, but you would most certainly have the problem of essentially doubling your SEO work. Having yourselves named after a state is not a huge deal. I worked for a company in a similar situation once and it didn't seem to hurt us much, it's really pretty common. Google provides ways of moving your URL if you wish to do that, but if it were me I'd steer clear of creating an entirely new website, unless you really just want to give your programmer a lot of work to do!
You might possibly setup a new ecommerce site and keep your old one as more of a corporate informational site. You would then want to do 301s (moved content) to the new site from your product pages. I am not fully sure of the ramifications of this (cross domain 301) though, someone else may want to comment on that.
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
-
Deceptive site warning from Google: Java script and meta descriptions deployed.
Hi all, We received a deceptive site warning from Google recently. Seems like there is a deceptive content on some pages of the website. Some pages are removed from Google index. Meta descriptions have been deployed on the site few days ago. There is also java script on the website which we use for tracking visitors like GA. I wonder what's the reason for this alert? We believe its due to the Java script. Do you think meta descriptions will harm this bad? Any ideas? Thanks
Search Behavior | | vtmoz0 -
Different SERPs positions UK - Ireland
Hi there! I've been checking rankings in UK and Ireland for the last months and I found something really interesting... "Belfast + keyword" - UK = 2º position / Ireland = 1º position "keyword + Belfast" - UK = 14º position / Ireland = 1º position *(same keyword) I don't understand how it is possible... Website is not geo-targeted so Google has no preference for any of these countries... Any ideas about why does it happen?
Search Behavior | | seosogood1 -
My site traffic decreasing day by day
unfortunately its very bad for us . after panda update not affected any more but recent time . anybody can help us to fix the issue blog http://gurujobalert.com/ please thanks in advance
Search Behavior | | jenindras10 -
Time Spend on Site from Smartphone vs Desktop
On a website with a well optimized website for smartphones, how long time should one expect the average user spends on the website - from their smartphone - as a % of the time users spends from a desktop.
Search Behavior | | khi5
Example: if average user spends 10min on the site from a desktop, is 5min (50% of..) a decent number to expect? If anyone has any done any studies or have data on this, would be appreciated. thank you0 -
Google site: search showing twice amount of indexed pages. why?
I have around 50k pages indexed on my site but when I do a google site: of my site it shows around 100k pages indexed. Why is it showing so much more? It is also only showing around 700 pages indexed in my web masters account for the site. Background: We have a custom site map being generated automatically. Let me know if you would like more info, Thanks.
Search Behavior | | Nicktaylor10 -
Disallow robots on a url effect?
Hello, I am using wordpress and on some of my top tag urls e.g : http://www.designzzz.com/tag/brushes/ there is an avg page rank of 4. I was reading somewhere that my huge jump in not selected count in index status in GWT is becuase of tags/categories urls. So i added disallow in my robots.txt for the url /tag What sort of effect will it have on my tag urls rankings or PR ?
Search Behavior | | wickedsunny10 -
Internal Site Search Analysis
Hi Folks, I have about 6,000 internal site search phrases that I want to analyze. There are many variations and duplicates that have similar intent within the data, e.g. Employment, Employment Opportunities, Employment Application. Does anyone have any thoughts on how I can aggregate the data to get an idea of user intent. There's a lot of long-tail in there. The data does not come from Google's site search tool. I just have a spreadsheet of the terms and the number of times they were searched. Cheers!
Search Behavior | | BedeFahey0 -
Where can I find research into consumer behavior in URL input?
I have a hypothesis that the % of users that type URLs is decreasing. Instead I think users will be arriving at sites by clicking on links in emails, search and social. Where can I find data / research to back me up?
Search Behavior | | TomCritchlow0