When a client clones there UK site copy for a US version....
-
Buonngiorno from 16 degrees C cloudy wetherby UK,
A client has cloned their UK sites copy for a US version. What theyve now got is a USA site and a uK site with exactly the same copy, the only difference is the suffix.
Am i right in saying this will cause problems when for example a browser enters a phrase and two sites appear in the SERPS. Is a solution to this to block the usa site from appearing in the UK (is this possible?).
Yes i know the true fix is to change the copy but we are dealing with clients here
Grazie,
David -
Hey Thanks Oliver, much appreciated (& Ron Too)
-
Hi David,
- Is there different address/telephone numbers on the websites, one UK and one American?
- Is there one website with UK £ for currency and American $?
- In webmaster tools is one set as a US based website and the other UK?
- Does one website have American based links pointing to them and the other UK based links?
We looked into something similar for a client that was wanting the same website in terms of content for 3 different countries and we came across this blog post http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
After reading it we felt that along as the above were different and that the UK website had a UK IP hosting address and the American one had an American hosting IP address we felt it would be ok.
Would be very interested to hear from other people's experiences with regards to this in case we have got it wrong.
Hope that this helps.
-
Yes you are right. Panda specifically penalizes sites with duplicate content. You need to have at least 65% original content on each page to avoid this penalty. I would suggest that you localize the UK page with references to the area and integrate local terminology, spelling and slang to address part of this problem. Hopefully this will create enough of a rewrite to make the content essentially unique.
As far as the client goes I am assuming they are trying to save some money because they don't understand the value of doing things correctly. You may want to look at ways to monetize the traffic they are already getting and might lose or better yet show them the traffic they are losing to their competitors. A few ways you might consider putting this value into real terms is to equate the cost of clicks to the average cost of a paid click for the same terms. You might also want to look at the actual value of each new customer over their entire customer life. For example a chiropractor might only get $76 for an individual visit but might get $8,000 over their average customer cycle. If the customer never hits the site because of bad content or SEO it did not cost your client $76 it cost them $8,000 per customer lost. If the site get 1,000 visits with a .002 conversion that is really two customers and $16000 revenue lost. Usually when people look at their traffic in these terms spending the money to do it right makes more sense.
I hope this helps,
Ron
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
-
Traffic drop on this site
I am SEO'ing this site but need some assistance in the analysis. it was doing not too bad but in the last 4 months the google traffic has really fallen off, i suspect the keywords may need improving but any tips or observations would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crowng0 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Combine .com and .co.uk domain? So forward .co.uk to .com for SEO?
Hello, A new client of mine has an .com and an .co.uk domain. Both the same content (and they don't have the capacity to make specific content on both domains). I am thinking building al domain authority to 1 domain. In this case the .com domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders
And forward the .co.uk to this .com domain.
In this way, the .com will rank in both UK as in other English speaking countries, right? Or not?
Or should I use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag? I am not sure. But I do know big brands rank high in the Netherlands with .com domains (for example booking.com). Looking forward on feedback on best practices here... Thanks!0 -
Is this site worth subscribing to?
Hi everyone is, the below site worthwhile submitting to? I see one of our competitors is on here and the article they have published has in turn be picked up by other sites. Is the financial cost worth the back link reward? https://app.prweb.com/Main.aspx?Entity=Home
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hardley10 -
What happened to my site?
This is my website: http://goo.gl/Brekn It was related to health niche. I am good with the serp for the last couple of hours. I am in top for the keywords: cure for piles, hemorrhoids treatment, natural hemorrhoid treatment. My main keyword is hemorrhoids treatment. And has recently added this page, http://goo.gl/SXNtX This page has some dupe content, as content writer was busy i have copied the content from other sources. Does this have any effect? I have not added this page onto homepage as i dont like google to index it until my copywriter writes the content. Dont know what happened, in the last few hours i lost my serp to no where. Can anyone tell me what happened to my site. Did i done anything wrong? In the last week i have added a link to my ebooks related site. Does this affected my serps? Or did the Google recent change http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html Has any effect on my site? Awaiting for your replies...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dex324344320 -
Targetting site in 3 countries
I have read the seomoz post at - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday before asking the question We recieved a query from one of our client regarding targetting his site in 3 different countries namely - US,UK and Australia. Specifically, he has asked us- 1. Whether i should buy ccTLD like - www.example.co.uk www.example.com.au www.example.com and write unique content for each of the above. or 2. or go for subfolder approach www.example.com/UK www.example.com/AU will it affect SEO if the subfolders are in CAPS. Would like to have advice of moz community on what advice will be the best. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Badges For a B2b site
love this seo tactic but it seems hard to get people to adopt it Has anyone seen a successful badge campaign for a b2b site? please provide examples if you can.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
What is the best practice when a client is setting up multiple sites/domains
I have a client that is creating separate websites to be used for different purposes. What is the best practice here with regards to not looking spammy. i.e. do the domains need to registered with different companies? hosted on different servers, etc? Thanks in advance for your response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan-1718030