Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to make second site in same niche and do white hat SEO
-
Hello,
As much as we would like, there's a possibility that our site will never recover from it's Google penalties.
Our team has decided to launch a new site in the same niche.
What do we need to do so that Google will not mind us having 2 sites in the same niche? (Menu differences, coding differences, content differences, etc.)
We won't have duplicate content, but it's hard to make the sites not similar.
Thanks
-
I'm sorry to hear that I would recommend requesting the people linking to your existing site that are using high quality powerful links to update the back link to point to your new site.
the advantages of dealing with people with legitimate sites are they are much easier to find and will actually help you with these types of things. It's not the nightmare that it is trying to get a hold of a blackhat webmaster.
Outside of creating a 100% legitimate website with a slightly different niche may be content, inbound marketing whatever buzzword you want to use for the very short time I hope it takes you to get your most powerful white hat links to point to your new website.
Removeem.com It is a wonderful tool for finding the names and contact info of webmasters you can use it to make a polite request saying that you have a new domain and you would appreciate if they would please update the link pointing at your site.
After you have taken the best Backlinks away from your existing site I would move to your new site.
I would also be upfront about moving place text saying you are changing domain names in a conspicuous location on your site.
If you feel that your livelihood is being jeopardized by this I definitely can understand I would then really put 110% into creating some top-notch content and user friendly/mobile design on your new brand. When you go live you want to really have something better than what you had before.
I'm sorry I don't know any methods that would be instant but I would consider using pay per click to soften the blow.
I hope this is of help,
Thomas
-
Tom,
I appreciate the responses and they make sense. I don't see a solution. I don't see our current site ever pulling out of penalty no matter what I do and we've got an income off of it.
Any ideas?
-
this is older but
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/11/best-practices-for-running-multiple.html
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4557285.htm
and this discussion of tactics used to do what are considered now black hat
http://www.nichepursuits.com/should-you-host-all-your-niche-sites-on-the-same-hosting-account/
it is no ok in Google ad words either
sorry for all the posts,
Tom
-
with all that said I think if you go after a slightly new niche or offer things from a different angle you're obviously doing twice the work.
Are you concerned that if you 301 redirect you will be bringing the penalty over?
sincerely,
Tom
-
talking about taking the new site and building it using white hat tactics that were implemented after the penalty in which the original site has yet to return from. I know that creating sites that are essentially going to be the same but contain unique content just to get better rankings is against the rules.
if you remove the first site after building the first site using white hat methods currently employed on the existing site
( I should say domain because that's what's coming down to right?)
it would be in your best interest to remove the first site when the second website goes live.
I know this is not the ideal situation because you probably have some good Backlinks on the original but having two sites that are competing for the same niche owned by the same person/company would be competing for the same place in the SERPS I believe would be considered a method of rigging the system.
if you have one site that is completely fine if you have one that is going to go after different niche that is completely fine.
I am basing this on an e-commerce client of mine who had competitor selling the exact same product with unique content across three domains.
The client reported this to Google and the spam team acted or there was an incredible coincidence because two months later sites reported could not be found in Google's index.
I that is of help,
Tom will
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
-
Site Footer Links Used for Keyword Spam
I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble. On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer: 9 footer links:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RosemaryB
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR Firms Each link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other. The canonical for each page links back to itself. I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy. Interested in your view.
Rosemary0 -
The use of a ghost site for SEO purposes
Hi Guys, Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site. After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com. It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain? Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic? Thanks, Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOBirmingham810 -
Sitelinks Search Box impact for SEO
I am wondering how the relatively new sitelinks search box impacts the SEO rankings for a specific site or keyword combination - do you guys have any experience or bechmarks on this? Obviously it should help on getting more real estate on the SERP page (due to adding the search box), but do you also get extra goodwill and improved SERP position from adding it? Also, is the impact different on different type of terms, let's say single brand or category term such as "Bestbuy" (or "coupon") or a combination term "Bestbuy Apple" (or "Dixons coupon")? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tjr0 -
Why does expired domains still work for SEO?
Hi everyone I’ve been doing an experiment during more than 1 year to try to see if its possible to buy expired domains. I know its considered black hat, but like I said, I wanted to experiment, that is what SEO is about. What I did was to buy domains that just expired, immediately added content on a WP setup, filled it with relevant content to the expired domain and then started building links to other relevant sites from these domains.( Here is a pretty good post on how to do, and I did it in a similar way. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2297718/How-to-Build-Links-Using-Expired-Domains ) This is nothing new and SEO:s has been doing it for along time. There is a lot of rumors around the SEO world that the domains becomes worthless after they expire. But after trying it out during more than 1 year and with about 50 different expired domains I can conclude that it DOES work, 100% of the time. Some of the domains are of course better than others, but I cannot see any signs of the expired domains or the sites i link to has been punished by Google. The sites im liking to ranks great ONLY with those links 🙂 So to the question: WHY does Google allow this? They should be able to see that a domain has been expired right? And if its expired, why dont they just “delete” all the links to that domain after the expiry date? Google is well aware of this problem so what is stopping them? Is there any one here that know how this works technically?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sir0 -
Multiple stores for the same niche
I started developing a new niche of products in my country about 3 years ago. That's when I opened my first store. Everything went fine, until a year ago, when someone I thought was a friend secretly stole my idea and made his own competing store. I was pretty upset when I caught him and decided to make it as difficult as possible for him, so I made another 4 stores, trying to get him as low as possible in the search results. The new sites have similar products (although not 100% identical), slightly different titles, images and prices. They look different and are built on different e-commerce platforms. They are all hosted on the same server, have roughly the same backlinks, use the same Google account for Analytics, have the same support phone numbers etc etc. I wasn't thinking that I'm doing something fishy, so I didn't try to hide anything. Trouble is that those sites, after doing fine for a few months, dropped like bricks in the search results, almost to the point that they can't be found at all. At the moment, the only site that ranks relatively well is the original one and a couple of secondary pages with no importance from one of the other sites. How did this happen? Does Google have something against this practice? Did they take action by themselves when they realized that I was trying to monopolize this niche, or did my competitor report me for some kind of webspam? And more importantly, what do I do now? Do I shutdown all but my original site and 301 redirect users to it from the others? Can I report my competitor for engaging in the same practice? (He fought back and now he has 3-4 sites, some of which still rank kind of OKish, also he has no idea about web development, SEO or marketing, he just crudely copies what I do and is slowly but surely starting to do better than me).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pandronic0 -
Off-page SEO and link building
Hi everyone! I work for a marketing company; for one of our clients' sites, we are working with an independent SEO consultant for on-page help (it's a large site) as well as off-page SEO. Following a meeting with the consultant, I had a few red flags with his off-page practices – however, I'm not sure if I'm just inexperienced and this is just "how it works" or if we should shy away from these methods. He plans to: guest blog do press release marketing comment on blogs He does not plan to consult with us in advance regarding the content that is produced, or where it is posted. In addition, he doesn't plan on producing a report of what was posted where. When I asked about these things, he told me they haven't encountered any problems before. I'm not saying it was spam-my, but I'm more not sure if these methods are leaning in the direction of "growing out of date," or the direction of "black-hat, run away, dude." Any thoughts on this would be crazy appreciated! Thanks, Casey
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaseyDaline0 -
Rollover design & SEO
After reading this article http://www.seomoz.org/blog/designing-for-seo some questions came up from my developers. In the article it says "One potential solution to this problem is a mouse-over. Initially when viewed, the panel will look as it does on the left hand side (exactly as the designer want it), yet when a user rolls over the image the panel changes into what you see on the right hand side (exactly what the SEO wants)." My developers say" Having text in the rollovers is almost like hiding text and everyone knows in SEO that you should never hide text. "In the article he explains that it is not hidden text since its visible & readable by the engines.What are everyone's thoughts on this? Completely acceptable or iffy?Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Ever seen a black hat SEO hack this sneaky?
A friend pointed out to me that a University site had been hacked and used to gain top Google rankings. But it was cloaked so that most users wouldn't notice the hack. Only Googlebot and visitors from Google SERPs for the spam keywords would see a hacked version. See http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/122-how-hackers-gained-an-easy-1-google-ranking-using-a-university-website.whtml (my blog) for screenshot and specifics. I've dealt with hacks before, but nothing this evil and sneaky. Ever seen anything like this? This is not our client, but was just curious if others had seen a hack like this before.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdamThompson0