Are 2 sites in same niche from same company white hat?
-
Hello,
We want to open a second eCommerce store. Our first one is doing well. It would be different code, different graphics, a different category/menu system, but many of the products will be the same.
Will that be safe and white hat now and into the future to have 2?
Thanks!
-
I agree with Keri. You already have a site with traction. Improve it. Add pages that compete for new products, new keywords. They will be immediately competitive.
Why start a second site with ZERO traction? It can take a few years to get a new site ranking well.
-
I'd still want to ask why? Why put the work into two sites, and divide your effort between them? If the time from the new site was instead allocated to the existing site, could that make it the leader in its field?
-
This is some of the most wise responses I've seen. Here's my plan of action. Please comment:
1. Decide on unique niche. Develop 2 long excellent pieces of content (only article on site) that provide a direction and niche separating the new site from the other site.
2. Of course, very very little duplicate content anywhere, new pictures.
3. Excellently helpful content on home page and category pages addresses the unique niche addressed in the two long pieces of content.
4. 10% of all products must not be on the original site
5. Completely different on-Site SEO when possible (different keywords that when possible represent uniquie niche)
Any comments?
-
From the sounds of it you're in the clear for now and the foreseeable future, but this is liable to change and as already said you must ensure that there is little (if any) duplicate content from one site to the other. It will depend on how you go about it (especially with regard to your link profile and content development). I would attempt to find a difference between the 2 sites and use that to expand into a slightly different market niche (and try to capture them both). Wish you the best of luck!
Rob
-
As said above you need different targets and objectives for the site. You also need to write new content with whatever your new positioning is. To avoid duplicate content penalties you should also use different pictures and descriptions as well.
-
If you're serving multiple target audiences, then this is entirely white hat. If you're doing it for usability (segmenting products based on category), it's white hat. If you're doing it to own the top 8 listings instead of the top 4 for the same search terms, that feels grey hat.
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
-
Want to remove a large amount of links from spam sites. SEO company says we will lose a lot of link juice?
Hi, We have a lot of links that have a spam score above 30% and 60%. I don't know if someone has spammed our website. However our SEO company has said we should remove these carefully over a period of 3 months while they add new good links. I don't quite trust this advice. Are they trying to get more business?? They have put doubt in our mind. Can anyone please shed any light on this?? Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YvonneDupree0 -
Is new domian redirection to old domain make risk for my site ?
i have site with Da about 30 and i have many project on it if i register a domain for each project and after that redirect to my site is that bad for my site and my site seo ? for ex: my project is : mysite.com/helloword i register helloworld.com or domain like that helllo-world.com and redirctet to mysite.com/helloworld
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MidnightShop791 -
Is this site buying backlinks?
dankstop.com Almost all of their links come from mainly the same few sites, and some of their links have a really high spam score.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tlorenzi0 -
Site build in the 80% of canonical URLs - What is the impact on visibility?
Hey Everyone, I represent international wall decorations store where customer can freely choose a pattern to be printed on a given material among a few milions of patterns. Due to extreme large number of potential URL combinations we struggle with too many URL adressess for a months now (search console notifications). So we finally decided to reduce amount of products with canonical tag. Basing on users behavior, our business needs and monthly search volume data we selected 8 most representative out of 40 product categories and made them canonical toward the rest. For example: If we chose 'Canvas prints' as our main product category, then every 'Framed canvas' product URL points rel=canonical tag toward its equivalent URL within 'Canvas prints' category. We applied the same logic to other categories (so "Vinyl wall mural - Wild horses running" URL points rel=canonical tag to "Wall mural - Wild horses running" URL, etc). In terms of Googlebot interpretation, there are really tiny differences between those Product URLs, so merging them with rel=canonical seems like a valid use. But we need to keep those canonicalised URLs for users needs, so we can`t remove them from a store as well as noindex does not seem like an good option. However we`re concerned about our SEO visibility - if we make those changes, our site will consist of ~80% canonical URLs (47,5/60 millions). Regarding your experience, do you have advices how should we handle that issue? Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _JediMindBender
JMB0 -
Competitors with duplicate sites for backlinks
Hello all, In the last few months, my company has seen some keywords we historically rank well for fall off the first page, and there are a couple competitors that have appeared that use backlinks from seemingly the same site. For fairness, our site has slow page load speeds that we are working on changing, as well as not being mobile friendly yet. The sites that are ranking are mobile friendly and load fast, but we have heaps of other words still ranking well, and I'm more curious about this methodology. For example, these two pages: http://whiteboards.com.au/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JustinBSLW
http://www.glasswhiteboards.com.au/ In OSE, glasswhiteboards has the majority of links from whiteboards, and the content between the sites is the same. My page has higher domain authority & page authority, but less backlinks. However, if you take away the backlinks from the duplicate site, they are the same. Isn't this type of content supposed to be flagged? My question is about whether this kind of similar site on different domains is a good idea to build links, as all my research shows that it's poor in the long run, but it seems to be working with these guys. Another group of sites that has been killing us uses this same method, with multiple sites that look the same that all link to each other to build up backlinks. These sites do have different content. It seems instead of building different categories within their own site, they have purchased multiple domains that act as their categories. Here's just a few: http://www.lockablenoticeboards.com.au/
http://www.snapperframes.com/
http://www.snapperdisplay.com.au/
http://www.light-box.com.au/
http://www.a-frame-signs.com.au/
http://www.posterhangers.com.au/0 -
Creating duplicate site for testing purpose. Can it hurt original site
Hello, We are soon going to upgrade the cms to latest version along with new functionlaities - the process may take anywhere from 4 week to 6 weeks. may suggest - we need to work on live server, what we have planned take exact replica of site and move to a test domain, but on live server Block Google, Bing, Yahoo - User-agent: Google Disallow: / , User-agent: Bing Disallow: / User-agent: Yahoo Disallow: / in robots.txt Will upgrade CMS and add functionality - will test the entire structure, check url using screaming frog or xenu and move on to configure the site on original domain The process upgradation and new tools may take 1 - 1.5 month.... Concern is that despite blocking Google, Bing & Yahoo through User agent disallow - can still the url can be crawled by the search engines - if yes - it may hurt the original site as will read on as entire duplicate or is there any alternate way around.. Many thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi1 -
What if White Hat SEO does not get results?
If company A is paying 5k a month and some of that budget is buying links or content that might be in the gray area but is ranking higher than company B that's following the "rules" and paying the same but not showing up at all, what's company B suppose to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EmarketedTeam2 -
Black Hat? Is it really possible my new client paid someone to SEO the word "here"?
I just took on a client and first thing I saw in Webmaster Tools was the dreaded "Unnatural Link Patterns" message dated Apr 7th, 2012. MajesticSEO is reporting 212 backlinks, OSE is reporting 251. Nothing out of the ordinary, in fact they only anchor text is their brand. However, we then ran an SEO PowerSuite Crawl and found 429 backlinks with 78.1% of links use the anchor text "here" and 77.9% of all links point to the same URL. If this is indeed true I can see why they got the message from Google. The company has admitted they hired a service to do SEO for $299/mo for several months but when they saw no results they quit. Could this company really have gone after "here". It not, I can't find anything that would give them the message they got from Google Webmaster Tools.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Dweber0