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.
Two websites vs each other owned by same company
-
My client owns a brand and came to me with two ecommerce websites. One website sells his specific brand product and the other sells general products in his niche (including his branded product).
Question is my client wants to rank each website for basically the same set of keywords.
We have two choices I'd like feedback on-
Choice 1 is to rank both websites for same keyword groupings so even if they are both on page 1 of the serps then they take up more real estate and share of voice. are there any negative possibilities here?
Choice 2 is to recommend a shift in the position of the general industry website to bring it further away from the industry niche by focusing on different keywords so they don't compete with each other in the serps.
I'm for choice 1, what about you?
-
I have came across similar situations before and I have to say that Choice 1 should be no problem at all as long as the content is fairly unique on each site. This should rule out the chance of duplicate content.
I guess it all depends on the volume, but for me I would go with choice 2. Simply because you then get to cover more spread and aren't stuck in one specific niche.
Truth is there is no right or wrong, both will work fine. It just depends on volume/competition
-
Thanks for the insight Patrick.
For many reasons the websites must remain separate, good suggestion though.
Rich
-
Hi there
I guess my main question is why two sites if you're trying to rank for the same set of keywords? Has he thought about combining? Moz has a great post on the potential benefit of combining two websites, but that's something you'll need to heavily research and chat with your client about. Here's that post.
If nothing else, more real estate sounds good to me so I would do option 1. Don't forget there are awesome Schema opportunities such as sameAs that can help you tie your properties together and help search engines understand your web presence. I would also make sure that you look into cross domain tracking so your client has a better understanding of his performance and eCommerce.
Hope this helps - good luck!
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
-
One domain or two for one company with two lines of business?
Let's say you are building a new company that is involved in two lines of business. Let's for example say one line of business is handling logistics for large conventions where the customer(s) are large corporation and the other line is for wedding planning. Let's say that for certain reasons the owner wants to operate under one brand name, say "PROEVENT" So they will market themselves as PROEVENT Convention Logistics and PROEVENT Wedding Planners. From an SEO perspective, if you have one side of the business doing B-to-B corporate business and the other doing B-to-C do you create two different websites on different domains (proeventconventions.com and proeventweddings.com) with unique design and content, or, do you just use provent.com in order to build better domain authority and on your marketing you use conventions.provent.com that takes you to the convention section of the website and weddings.provent.com takes you to the weddings section?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee0 -
Microsites: Subdomain vs own domains
I am working on a travel site about a specific region, which includes information about lots of different topics, such as weddings, surfing etc. I was wondering whether its a good idea to register domains for each topic since it would enable me to build backlinks. I would basically keep the design more or less the same and implement a nofollow navigation bar to each microsite. e.g.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kinimod
weddingsbarcelona.com
surfingbarcelona.com or should I rather go with one domain and subfolders: barcelona.com/weddings
barcelona.com/surfing I guess the second option is how I would usually do it but I just wanted to see what are the pros/cons of both options. Many thanks!0 -
How important is the optional <priority>tag in an XML sitemap of your website? Can this help search engines understand the hierarchy of a website?</priority>
Can the <priority>tag be used to tell search engines the hierarchy of a site or should it be used to let search engines know which priority to we want pages to be indexed in?</priority>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mycity4kids0 -
We have two different websites with the same products and information, will that hurt our rankings?
We have two different domains, one for the UK and the other for the US, they have the exact same products, categories and information. (the information is almost the same in 400 products) We know that Google could recognize that as duplicate content, but will that actually hurt our rankings in both sites? Is it better if we create two completely different versions of the content on those pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoitWiser0 -
Different domains for multilingual website
Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruLee0 -
One Way Links vs Two Way Links
Hi, Was speaking to a client today and got asked how damaging two way links are. i.e. domaina.com links to domainb.com and domainb.com links back to domaina.com. I need a nice simple layman's explanation of if/how damaging they are compared to one way links. And please don't answer with you lose link juice as I have a job explaining link juice.... I am explaining things to a non techie! Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
External 404 vs Internal 404
Which one is bad? External - when someone adds an incorrect link to your site, maybe does a typo when linking to an inner page. This page never existed on your site, google shows this as a 404 in Webmaster tools. Internal - a page existed, google indexed it, and you deleted it and didnt add a 301. Internal ones are in the webmaster's control, and i can understand if google gets upset if it sees a 404 for a URL that existed before, however surely "externally created" 404 shoudnt cause any harm cause that page never existed. And someone has inserted an incorrect link to your site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0 -
301 Redirects After Company Acquisition
We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt1