Semi-duplicate content yet authoritative site
-
So I have 5 real estate sites.
One of those sites is of course the original, and it has more/better content on most of the pages than the other sites. I used to be top ranked for all of the subdivsion names in my town. Then when I did the next 2-4 sites, I had some sites doing better than others for certain keywords, and then I have 3 of those sites that are basically the same URL structures (besides the actual domain) and they aren't getting fed very many visits. I have a couple of agents that work with me that I loaned my sites to to see if that would help since it would be a different name. My same youtube video is on each of the respective subdivision pages of my site and theirs. Also, their content is just rewritten content from mine about the same length of content.
I have looked over and seen a few of my competitors who only have one site and their URL structures arent good at all, and their content isn't good at all and a good bit of their pages rank higher than my main site which is very frustrating to say the least since they are actually copy cats to my site. I sort of started the precedent of content, mapping the neighborhood, how far that subdivision is from certain landmarks, and then shot a video of each. They have pretty much done the same thing and are now ahead of me.
What sort of advice could you give me? Right now, I have two sites that are almost duplicate in terms of a template and same subdivsions although I did change the content the best I could, and that site is still getting pretty good visits. I originally did it to try and dominate the first page of the SERPS and then Penguin and Panda came out and seemed to figure that game out. So now, I would still like to keep all the sites, but I'm assuming that would entail making them all unique, which seems to be tough seeing as though my town has the same subdivisions.
Curious as to what the suggestions would be, as I have put a lot of time into these sites.
If I post my site will it show up in the SERPS?
Thanks in advance
-
Thanks Andy,
My thoughts here, as I just answered Russ, is that I will keep two sites (the two best performing ones, but go ahead and add great content to one, and that should help me, right? I ask because the other site that is similar is still getting moderately good traffic and it is a site for one of my other agents so it's not really tied to me, so by making my site better and better, it will make hers less and less similar right?
-
Thanks Russ,
That is pretty much what I ended up doing with my site, to where I made it a bit overwhelming for someone to compete with me and as I got super busy (because of the work that I did to my site) others have copied my sites and have started doing what I was doing. I still have higher Domain Authority than they do, and as I get more time like I have now, I will be doing more writing and researching, etc. That has been my goal all along, the only problem is one of the other sites that I have one of my agents on, has a site, pretty similar to mine, but she still gets great leads and makes money off of the site, so I don't want to quickly can that site even though it's very similar to my site. Thoughts on that?
-
Hi,
I would strongly urge you not to run multiple sites. If Google catches on to this, you will end up with a penalty for all of them. This would be seen as a way to try and 'game' the search engine by trying to find ways to get more exposure for keywords. What you will also find is that you are competing against your own sites in terms of keywords, which is never an area you want to get in to.
Look at it from Google's eyes - if they were to ask you why you have 5 sites, what would be your answer? I promise you that they wouldn't let you get away with it.
Best thing to do here is ditch all but one site and concentrate, as Russ suggests, on amazing content. Pull everything back to within one domain and create pages to target specific keywords, but don't make it spammy. Well researched content will win every time and can result in great SERP placements.
-Andy
-
Focus on one site for the time being and make it, without question, objectively, the best site in your area. Blow the competition out of the water. I'm talking thousands of words of content, interviews with neighborhood HOA members, guides to neighborhood schools, recommendations of local restaurants and businesses (great backlink opportunities, syndicated content from GreatSchools or other sites, etc. Literally make it so no other website even wants to compete with yours. Be the best. Don't divide an conquer, just conquer.
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
-
Mixing up languages on the same page + possible duplicate content
I have a site in English hosted under .com with English info, and then different versions of the site under subdirectories (/de/, /es/, etc.) Due to budget constraints we have only managed to translate the most important info of our product pages for the local domains. We feel however that displaying (on a clearly identified tab) the detailed product info in English may be of use for many users that can actually understand English, and may help us get more conversions to have that info. The problem is that this detailed product info is already used on the equivalent English page as well. This basically means 2 things: We are mixing languages on pages We have around 50% of duplicate content of these pages What do you think that the SEO implications of this are? By the way, proper Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions as well as implementation of href lang tag are in place.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauraseo0 -
Identifying Duplicate Content
Hi looking for tools (beside Copyscape or Grammarly) which can scan a list of URLs (e.g. 100 pages) and find duplicate content quite quickly. Specifically, small batches of duplicate content, see attached image as an example. Does anyone have any suggestions? Cheers. 5v591k.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Tools to scan entire site for duplicate content?
HI guys, Just wondering if anyone knows of any tools to scan a site for duplicate content (with other sites on the web). Looking to quickly identify product pages containing duplicate content/duplicate product descriptions for E-commerce based websites. I know copy scape can which can check up to 10,000 pages in a single operation with Batch Search. But just wondering if there is anything else on the market i should consider looking at? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Lot of duplicate content and still traffic is increasing... how does it work?
Hello Mozzers, I've a dilemma with a client's site I am working on that is make me questioning my SEO knowledge, or the way Google treat duplicate content. I'll explain now. The situation is the following: organic traffic is constantly increasing since last September, in every section of the site (home page, categories and product pages) even though: they have tons of duplicate content from same content in old and new URLs (which are in two different languages, even if the actual content on the page is in the same language in both of the URL versions) indexation is completely left to Google decision (no robots file, no sitemap, no meta robots in code, no use of canonical, no redirect applied to any of the old URLs, etc) a lot (really, a lot) of URLs with query parameters (which brings to more duplicated content) linked from the inner page of the site (and indexed in some case) they have Analytics but don't use Webmaster Tools Now... they expect me to help them increase even more the traffic they're getting, and I'll go first on "regular" onpage optimization, as their title, meta description and headers are not optimized at all according to the page content, but after that I was thinking on fixing the issues with indexation and content duplication, but I am worried I can "break the toy", as things are going well for them. Should I be confident that fixing these issues will bring to even better results or do you think is better for me to focus on other kind of improvements? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Guybrush_Threepw00d0 -
Duplicate content - Images & Attachments
I have been looking a GWT HTML improvements on our new site and I am scratching my head on how to stop some elements of the website showing up as duplicates for Meta Descriptions and Titles. For example the blog area: <a id="zip_0-anchor" class="zippedsection_title"></a>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CocoonfxmediaThis blog is full of information and resources for you to implement; get more traffic, more leads an
/blog/
/blog/page/2/
/blog/page/3/
/blog/page/4/
/blog/page/6/
/blog/page/9/The page has rel canonicals on them (using Yoast Wordpress SEO) and I can't see away of stopping the duplicate content. Can anyone suggest how to combat this? or is there nothing to worry about?
0 -
Duplicate content issues from mirror subdomain : facebook.domianname.com
Hey Guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b2bmarketer
Need your suggestions.
I have got a website that has duplicate content issue.
a sub-domain called facebook.asherstrategies .com comes from no where and is getting indexed.
Website Link : asherstrategies .com
subdomain link: facebook.asherstrategies .com This sub domain is actually a mirror of the website and i have no idea how is is created.
trying to resolve the issue but could not find the clue.0 -
Are all duplicate content issues bad? (Blog article Tags)
If so how bad? We use tags on our blog and this causes duplicate content issues. We don't use wordpress but with such a highly used cms having the same issue it seems quite plausible that Google would be smart enough to deal with duplicate content issues caused by blog article tags and not penalise at all. Here it has been discussed and I'm ready to remove tags from our blog articles or monitor them closely to see how it effects our rankings. Before I do, can you give me some advice around this? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daniel_B
Daniel.0 -
How do you prevent the mobile site becoming a duplicate of the full browser site?
We have a larger site with 100k+ pages, we need to create a mobile site which gets indexed in the mobile engines but I am afraid that google bot will consider these pages duplicates of the normal site pages. I know I can block it on the robots.txt but I still need it to be indexed for mobile search engines and I think google has a mobile crawler as well. Feel free to give me any other tips that I should follow while trying to optimize the mobile version. Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0