Guidelines for a second website business domain
-
Hi There,
A client is setting up a second website selling the same products from a separate domain with the same descriptions etc. The site will have a separate URL, but will administered from the same CMS. The only difference is the new site has only one brand instead of several on the main site.
E.G The main site sells all plumbing brands, the second site just one brand.
Your thoughts and advice for best practise would be much appreciated.
Andy (Marz Ventures)
-
Guess we have to set up a second CMS, content etc.
OK... submit to them.
If I ran a plumbing site and one brand tried to tell me how to run my biz I would do an analysis and determine where they fall into the market importance. I might decide to....
A) quit selling their CrappyBrand Plumbing Supplies
B) quit selling all other brands and focus on their CadillacBrand Plumbing Supplies
C) continue as I am and see if they cancel me
D) build a little outhouse to sell their crappy stuff
E) keep my current site and put a lot of effort into a site that sells only their brand
Consider doing an analysis before you spend any effort to kiss their feet. My crystal ball says there are going to be hundreds of sites selling their CrappyBrand Plumbing Supplies and nobody is going to be making good money from them.
The aim is not to manipulate the rankings,
Your client might not be trying to manipulate rankings. But the plumbing manufacturer is trying to flood the SERPs and manipluate vendors. My decision making would not be.... "Yes Sir".... or even binary.
-
Hi EGOL,
Thanks for your time on this. The reason for the second site is the company have been approached to represent a specific brand as an official brand distributor who want the products on a specific website.
I concur with your thoughts although I do feel my client is not attempting to manipulate Google, but the opportunity to be an official representative for a brand is one they are understandably keen to take.
Guess we have to set up a second CMS, content etc.
Thanks again.
Andy.
-
HI Andy,
The default answer would be this is not advised. The reason being is even though the second site is more focused you still are competing with yourself for rank on all the focused items. What is also alarming is that the statement "with the same descriptions etc". Now you are running into duplicate content issues. Search Engines try to give credit to the original author, when you put duplicate content on the web the search engines get to pick who the original author is. Lastly, you said it is going to be managed by the same CMS, which can mean that it maybe on a different domain but it will be on the same server, making it far more likely that it will considered duplicate content.
That is the default answer, but there are cases where it can make sense to run two websites that sell the same product. In fact that is what I manage. In our case, we are the manufacturer and a distributor. The manufacturing site doesn't sell products just explains how they are made and refers to the distribution sites for low volume orders. While the distribution site acknowledges the manufacture's site and refers custom applications back to them. These are two different classes of customers.
Another example would be in the service industry, lets say you run a concrete and cement mixing service. You may sell certain brands of concrete and cement and also physically deliver this product to job locations. Delivering cement can be an industry in and of itself, if you offer this service as standalone (bring your own cement) then it would make sense to run two websites, one offering the deliver service and one offering the actual product. In both cases you can cross reference each other for potential vertical integration.
Okay, now for standard practices. If you're going to run two domains pick two completely different host. You want your domains on different C-blocks. Second it is very strongly suggested that you do NOT use the same descriptions, write new content for each site. Lastly evaluate if the time and effort you spend to create a second site could not be better spent updating, optimizing, promoting your first site, it just may turn out that re-focusing efforts on a single site wins in the long run.
Remember Google is getting smarter every day they want to provide the very best results for every search that is entered into their system. If you can be creative and make your site the go to site for "whatever" then Google will eventually recognize that and return you as #1. Google is being proactive looking for business and people who are trying to trick them into serving erroneous top results. Gone are the days of "build it and they will come" now it is "build the best and they will come".
I hope this helps you,
Don
-
Thanks Tim,
The aim is not to manipulate the rankings, but that a brand have asked them to sell products for them on a separate domain. Many businesses have duplicate trading names, but we are saying Google does not account for this and my client can be penalised.
Tricky one when you are not intentionally trying to manipulate rankings.
If we go the root of canonical tags would I be right in assuming we kill any chance for the new domain to rank?
Thanks for your time.
Andy.
-
a second website selling the same products from a separate domain with the same descriptions etc.
Duplicate content. BAM! One site will probably be filtered from the SERPs.
If they are linked together Google will spot that and totally kill one site almost immediately. Google has been killing duplicate content sites, linked together for about ten years. Ten years.
Even if the sites are not linked together google will realize that there are two identical product pages competing in the SERPs and filter one of them.
Your thoughts and advice for best practise would be much appreciated.
If client's original site is not absolutely dominating the SERPS. The time and money spent on a second site usually returns a lower ROI than working on the original site.
This client is attempting the lazy approach. Just toss up duplicate pages and think they will make buckets of money. Google figured that out ten years ago. Everybody was doing that. Google figured that out to keep their SERPs clean.
I bet if client improved the current site by sharpening optimization, improving product descriptions, adding better photos, adding "how to do it" articles. This client is in plumbing, the perfect business to produce informative content for accomplishing a repair and recommending the parts, tools, supplies and books needed. There is where I would spend my time.
-
Although it may be a one product site, personally I would avoid running your new website whilst using the same content as this is going to start causing you duplicate content issues, this dupicate content is then possibly going to land your sites with penalties and may cause you to drop in the organic serps.
If you are adamant in doing this I would suggest marking your new sites content with rel canonical tags that reference your current site as the orignal authorative content location.
rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com/product-page/" />
However; my absolute personal recommendation would be to create your new site on a seperate host with a seperate CMS, and provide it with absolutely unique content this way the site will stand on its own two feet and likely do well with incurring duplicate penalties.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Single topic website or as part of a multiple topic website?
I have content sitting on a site here - https://www.pfizerpro.co.uk/product/xeljanz/rheumatoid-arthritis - domain authority 25 page authority 18 - the pages went live three months ago and the website was launched 18 months. We now have the option to use a brand new domain www.xeljanz.co.uk Which is the better option to stick with the www.pfizerpro.co.uk as it is a larger multiple topic site that should attract more links or to start a new single topic site which google may view as the better source as it is dedicated to the topic? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kate_team_DM0 -
Why is wrong domain being indexed?
We have 2 domains: revolve.com and fwrd.com (unrelated to each other, but hosted on the same server). If you do a site search for revolve.com but enter a designer brand that is only carried on FWRD (not on Revolve), the domain "revolve.com" pops up in the SERP, which is redirected to FWRD.com. Ex. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site%3Awww.revolve.com isabel marant Why is Google indexing the revolve.com pages, which don't actually exist? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Client rebranded with a new website but can't migrate now defunct franchise website to new website.
Hi everyone, My client is a chain of franchised restaurants with a local domain website named after the franchise. The franchise exited the market while the client stayed and built its own brand with a separate website. The franchise website (which is extremely popular) will be shut down soon but the client will not be able to redirect the franchise website to the new website for legal reasons. What can I do to ensure that we start ranking immediately for the franchise keyphrase as soon as the franchise website is shutdown. We currently have the new website and access to the old website (which we can't redirect) Thanks, T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tarek_Lel0 -
Is my website is having enough content on it to rank?
I have less content on my website, is this okay or I need to add more content on my pages? Website is - brandstenmedia.com.au Any other suggestions for the website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Green.landon0 -
Why domain authority increase
Hi all Our domian authority has increased from 39 to 42 last week. We have been improving our metadata and removing bad backlinks recently. Is there any other reason or updates last week that would have resulted in this increase? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gavinr
Gavin0 -
SEO connectivity between domains and sub-domains
Hi, My web site georgerossphotography.com and my ecommerce site store.georgerossphotography.com each reside on different servers. georgerossphotography.com has a domain authority of 30 store.georgerossphotography.com has a domain authority of 30 Clearly, they are considered two individual sites but is there any way that I can boost the performance of the primary domain by passing along some for that good SEO juice from the sub-domain? Any input would be gratefully received. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sirgeorge0 -
SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.
A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Strategy for a large website where you only work for one business unit.
I have been tasked with improving traffic/leads to www.intertek.com. The problems we face are that I only work for one of the business units. There are many within the company and they all work independantly. The services my division offers range from ISO certification to food safety/testing to oil and gas services. They want to increase their quality content and traffic. What is the best strategy to approach working with a company this diverse and the limitation of managing 500 pages of a 15,000 page site? What are the first steps and what actions do you think would give the best results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | laura-intertek0