Having 2 domains with same name - Impact on SEO
-
Hi AllAs we still dwindle with the rankings not coming in line with the efforts.I have a question:
We have 2 websites
1. http://www.example.com/ (which lost traffic and rank in Jan 2013). So we assumed that it was due to some penguin penalty. So we worked on disavow extra but nothing actually helped.Though there was no manual penalty mentioned in the GWT. Frustrated with this we thought of having another website 6 months back:
2. https://example.org/ - we did all the right things and by the book. But we are not seeing ranking here too. We did backlink analysis on all competitors and worked on only quality links they had. So all our links are highly highly relevant. But still the ranks are not moving beyond third page...in fact they moved to 6-7 page in last 2-3 days.
Please suggest ..
1. is it due to same name of domain (our brand name) causing the issue. If yes should we go for 302 or 301 redirect to save ourselves from any penalty that our last website may have got. We can not leave that name unattended as our cataloges etc have that website mentioned. i will expect a scientific reply here not gut feeling please.
2. Is it to do with .org domain extension that it should not be with commercial organizations like us
Kindly reply at the earliest
Regards
Aman
-
Thanks for reply Matt. Agreed these are some links which surely could be out of frustration. Can get them removed. But I have a question, check out our competitors who rank in India. You will be amazed to see their link building. Even one has a sub domain pligg sub domain for all kind of bad links even sex related etc.
However, how can you help us to achieve our goal. You can send a PM too... I will be very glad.
-
According to Ahrefs you have a 63% of referring pages contain the word "hair." Your top anchors are hair, loss, transplant, treatment, india
You had 3 links on .edu domains, all of which were spam comments on forums which have now been removed.
Even your latest links are not very clean:
- http://community.macmillan.org.uk/cancer_types/breast-cancer/f/38/p/51392/515703.aspx
- http://origin.wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=114120&p=6418306
Do you think those are natural backlinks passing a lot of value?
-
Thats a very Valid Suggestion...Thanks will surely do it
Also please see if you can to suggest something which is keeping out website from Rank
-
Aman,... well what you are doing is creating thin pages which over time might just risk a Panda Penalty. You might want to at least no-index those blog pages.
-
That right we could have... but was not ready for a 1% chance so thought this to be best.
Secondly we wanted to show the same copy
-
Why not just use rel canonical?
-
Hi Jonathan
These are just our news coverages posted in other websites. so to avoid content duplicacy we just post images.... apart from news events all categories have text posts
-
Yes!! Matt Definitely it is true for the first website. But now we have a in-house team working on this. That is why are very sure about the links and its relevancy.
But all the websites that are ranking have really bad links but still they rank. One odd keyword of our is on 1st page but main were on 3rd now pushed back to 7th.
Our content sharing is much wider than any one of them. We are simply perplexed why is this all happening to us.
1. We changed even to server in India for new website. That means both websites are on different servers. The new one is in India.
2. New website is secure https://
We know we are just there but there is something we are missing for sure and not able to find that out... it is becoming challenging question for us. Any no of people we ask noone tells us the right solutions
-
Why are your blog pages, just an image of a photocopy of someone elses article. You realise Google can't read the text from Images for SEO purposes right?
-
You had an SEO company working for you a few years ago, yes? They did some REALLY dodgy linking - and yes, you have link issues on the domains.
Unfortunately it looks like both domains have the same issue - you've bought links or had an SEO company do work in the past. Either way you need a disavow, site cleanup & new authority built to the site. The new site is really good looking. Good luck with it! Let me know if you need anything further.
-
Thanks Matt for the reply,
As We didn't receive any manual penalty in GWT whether it is Panda or Penguin, that caused us drop our ranking of .com site. But after that we studied thoroughly by ourselves a lot in order to know first whole about SEO, all Google updates, guidelines , and best practices etc. And revamped our old .com website from scratch; whether it is about new site structure, best UX from users point of view, unique content, internal linking, meta tags, curating high in-depth researched article or blog posts, building quality & high relevant links etc
We also found many many suspicious backlinks as well here and thought to cleanup that as well may be the reason behind.Yes, with keeping above all best SEO practices in mind to formed another new website https://example.org/ . BUT still we are facing STRANGE behavior to our website by Google, & not considered us to beat our competitors. We worked enough hard & done backlink profile analysis of our competitors and found many bad activities by them, still ranking in good position in SERPs than us.
-
Hi,
If you are using the same content on both website then that could be the major issue but If you are not using the same content then your site ranking is not down due to exact domain name with different extension.
Second, to clear up something "Google has no way of knowing that your domain is a 'new version' of the old one, unless you tell it. The method for this is a 301 redirect but as you are saying that your site's ranking went down due to algorithm update so there is no point to redirect old website to new.
You can do one thing put a splash page on old website like
"Old website has moved to new website
New website formally old website
& provide a 'click here' link to reach new website (*** No 301 redirect in your case**)
Thanks
-
Whenever you don't give us a specific domain to help on, you have to give as much info as possible. On the .com, after you disavowed did you build new authority or just assume the disavow would be enough? (It's not.) On the .com you said you lost traffic January 2013 which is Panda, not Penguin. So you were probably doing a whole lot of link cleanup to solve a problem you can't solve with link cleanup.
Given the other domain isn't ranking either, I'd guess you have some sort of Panda (content) issue. Duplicate content, repetitious & spammy titles, huge keyword stuffed meta keywords tags, thin or non-existent content, etc. Without seeing the site itself it's hard to say but this all reeks of Panda.
As to the questions:
-
No, it's not the domain name being similar. Without knowing the domains hard to say about 301.
-
Definitely not.
-
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
-
SEO: High intent organic revenue down in Europe
Our team is stumped and we are hoping some of you might have some insight! We are seeing a drop in Europe organic revenue and we can't seem to figure out what the core cause of the problem is. What's interesting, the high intent traffic is increasing across the business, as is organic-attributed revenue. And in Europe specifically, other channels appear to be doing just fine. This seems to be a Europe high-intent SEO problem. What we have established: Revenue was at a peak in Q4 2017 and Q1 2018 Revenue dips in mid-late Q2 2018 and again in Q4 2018 where it has stayed low since Organic traffic has gone up, conversion rate has gone down, purchases have gone down Paid search traffic has gone up, conversion rate has gone down slightly, submissions have gone up Currency changes are minimal We cannot find any site load issues What we know happened during this time frame (January 2018 onward): Updates to the website (homepage layout, some text changes) end of April 2018 GDPR end of May 2018 Google Analytics stops being able to track Firefox Europe is a key market for us and we cant figure out what might be causing this to happen - again, only in Europe - beyond GDPR and the changes we've made on our site is there anything else major that we're missing that could be causing this? Or does anyone have any insights as to where we should look? Thank you in advance!
Algorithm Updates | | RS-Marketing0 -
Prioritising SEO Tasks for Biggest Impact
Hi I want to find out, what people feel the top 3 focuses should be for an SEO (I know there are hundreds)...Content/Backlinks/Social/Technical I'm trying to better prioritise my work - I work on a large ecommerce site - with just me as the SEO & a development team in France So most of the technical stuff is controlled there. I focus on audits, KWD research & briefing content how to better optimise products. A lot of time is taken up by that as the site is so big & I'm concerned I am not putting enough effort into other areas. What should these areas be?! Backlinks/Content/Blogs - I can't do everything but would like to prioritise tasks which will have the
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey
biggest impact Can anyone help0 -
Bing SEO
Hi I am seeing a large drop in our traffic from Bing - this is usually a good traffic source for us. The drop seems to be at the same time Google had the slow roll out of Panda 4.2 - would this have anything to do with it? Becky
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
301'ing away from an exact match domain.
Hi Moz Community! My website gets just over 50% of its traffic from ranking in the top 3 in over 10 countries for my exact match keyword domain. 80% + from keywords related to the exact match domain. We are now looking at doing a to 301 re-direct to a new domain to start a fresh branding to the site to increase scope and expand. This would involve removing the keyword from the homepage and domain entirely . However. Considering all competitors ranking for our main keyword, have the keyword in their domain as either a subdomain to or in their root domain and in their homepage content, would this make ranking without the keyword in domain & content hard? I have found a very similar example that has done so, so I guess the answer to that question is no its not. about 65-70% of our anchor text on our backlinks is for our domain keyword. Can anyone advise how best to go about maintaining rankings after 301ing or how best to go about 301ing to make sure that we can maintain the rankings for our main keyword! Any advise at all would be greatly appreciated, Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | howiex10 -
Pdfs for SEO - benefits, downfalls and promotional methods
Hi fellow Mozzers, We're just in the middle of relaunching our website (a design agency), and I had a few questions re: SEO of our service keywords. The designers want the site to seem light on content, despite my advice that this would reduce the terms we can rank for. With that in mind, I was going to include advice pages that can be found via the site map, site search or text links but aren't promoted via the top level or second level nav. Another alternative I was going to explore was using pdfs for design case studies, so the site would feature a light case study, but with a more in-depth pdf available if wanted. I have located numerous articles highlighting how best to optimise pdfs, but I have a few queries aside from the technical standpoint. So: is this the best way to getting round the issue of keeping the site 'light' on content? are there stats that show CTRs on pdf pages over HTML? as well as optimising the pdf content and promoting them on our social media channel, is there a benefit from including them on the likes of Scribd, Edocr and so on (from either an SEO or simply from a promotional viewpoint, or both) Hopefully that's all clear! Nick
Algorithm Updates | | themegroup0 -
Google Algorithm change? - Brand name now overwriting title tag?
Anyone else noticing this happening? In Google search results, many of my sites are now showing up in the following fashion... "Site name: page title" I read a few articles in the past few days that state that Google may be playing with the algo but have not read anything from Google directly. I should add that I first noticed this on Feb. 21 and have seen it rolling out more and more since. I have only noticed it on a few competitor websites thus far. Edit:Some links talking about the subject http://www.seroundtable.com/google-brand-title-appending-16432.html http://semandseo.blogspot.ca/2013/03/google-brand-title-in-search.html http://www.designbigger.com/blog/seo/google-rewrites-page-titles-to-push-brand-over-keywords/
Algorithm Updates | | mattylac0 -
Our Developer Site randomly drops 10+ places in Google searches for our Company Name. Why?
Hey everyone, At Betable, we have a player-facing site and a developer-facing site. We also have a developer-facing blog. We have this issue where our developer-facing site will randomly drop 10+ places in Google's Search results for the keyword "betable". This problem can be reproduced by others and in incognito mode, so it's not just one person's results. Furthermore, the developer-facing blog and our social media accounts all suddenly rank higher than the developer site. Even stranger, this problem randomly fixes itself after a few days. This has happened twice so far, and on each occasion there were no changes to the website that would have prompted a drop in rank. After the first drop, we did our best to neutralize any SEOMoz "red alerts" but to no avail, the drop happened again last week. Can someone help us understand what's going on? Are there ways to avoid this? Thanks, Tyler
Algorithm Updates | | Betable0 -
Video SEO: Youtube, Vimeo PRO, Wistia, Longtail BOTR Experience and questions
Obviously Video SEO is changing, Google is figuring out how to do it themselves. We are left wondering… Below we have tried to explain what we have learned and how the different sites work and their characteristics (links to graphics provided) Our problem is: We are not getting congruent Google site:apalytics.tv Video filter results. We are wondering how duplicate content may be affecting our results… and if so, why will Youtube not be duplicate and prevent your own site SEO efforts from working. Is Youtube special? Does that include Vimeo too? We see our own duplicate videos on multiple sites in Google results, so it seems it is not duplicate related…? We’d appreciate your experience or add to our questions and work as a community to get this figured out more definitively. Thanks! We’ve tried four video hosting solutions at quite a cost monetarily and in time. 1.) Youtube, which gets all the SEO Juice and gets our clients on to other subjects or potentially competitive content. Iframes just don’t get the results we are looking for. 2.) See Vimeo Image: Vimeo PRO, a $200 year plus solution that allows us to do many video carousels on our own domains hosted on Vimeo, but are very limited in HTML as only CSS content changes are allowed. While we were using Vimeo we allowed the Vimeo.com community to SEO our content directly and they come up often in search results. Due to duplicate content concerns we have disallowed Vimeo.com from using our content and SEOing our content to their domain. However, we have many “portfolios” (micro limited carousal sites on our domains) that continue to carry the content. The Vimeo hosted micro site shows only three videos on Google: site:apalytics.tv During our testing we are concerned that duplicate content is causing issues too, so we are getting ready to shut off the many microsite domains hosted at Vimeo. (Vimeo has an old embed code that allows a NON-iframe embed – but has discontinued it recently) That makes it difficult if not impossible to retain SEO juice for anything other than their simple micro sites that are very limited! 3.) See Wistia Image: Wistia, a $2000 year plus solution that only provides private video site hosting embedding various types of video content on one’s site/s. Wistia has a free account now for three videos and limited plays – it’s a nice interface for SEO but is still different than BOTR. We opted for BOTR because of many other advertising related options, but are again trying Wistia with the free version to see if we can figure out why our BOTR videos are not showing up as hoped. We know that Google does not promise to index and feature every video on a sitemap, but why some are there and others are not and when remains a mystery that we are hoping to get some answers about. 4.) See Longtail Image: Longtail, Bits On The Run, (JW Player author) a $1,000 year plus like Wistia provides private hosting, but it allows a one button YouTube upload for the same SEO meta data and content – isn’t that duplicate content? BOTR creates and submits video sitemaps for your content, but it has not been working for us and it has been impossible to get a definitive answer as I think they too are learning or are not wanting the expose their proprietary methods (which are not yet working for us!) 2O9w0.png 0eiPv.png O9bXV.png
Algorithm Updates | | Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.0