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 divisions, same parent company, identical websites
-
A client of mine has intentionally built two websites with identical content; both companies sell the same product, one via an 80 year old local brand, well known. The other division is a national brand, new, and working to expand. The old and new divisions cannot be marketed as a single company for legal reasons. My life would be simple if the rules for distinguishing between nation's could apply, but I only have city X, and The U.S. I understand there is no penalty for duplicate content per se but I need to say to Google, "if searcher is in city X, serve content X. If not, serve content U.S. Both sites have atrocious DA and from what GA tells me, the National content appears to have never been served in a SERP in 3 years. I've been asked to improve visibility for both sites.
-
Hi, Katarina! Thanks for this very thorough response - I'm beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel. When you say stress the address via directories, you are referring to making sure my external listings and directories are current, consistent, correct, yes? Just confirming you are not recommending something internal to the site? We are writing out driving directions where possible, and using the google maps api to display the location.
Also, we won't have unique images for the products - I might be able to do something to edit them differently, but they are the same thing. Will naming them uniquely matter?
For the rest, we are writing, writing, writing! The client had no idea their former developer (yup, they paid someone to do this to them) had done a bad thing, and when I first read their GA and MOZ data (before we really dove into the content on each page and realized it had literally been pasted from one site to the other), I thought the data had to be wrong, ha!
We're pursuing the suggestion about unique content, and think we have a way way to enough of it to matter. Thanks for taking the time to answer. I will try to post some before and after scores when we are done.
-
Hi,
when you are saying 2 websites - are they completely different domains? In this case you need to rewrite the content. I cannot see how just different images would tell Google there isnt another identical website or a website with 90% of duplicated content.
I would suggest the following:
1. Keep the product names the same (unless you are allowed to change them) but make sure your images and descriptions are different.
2. Add completely different testimonials, reviews and case studies
3. Add completely different About us/Meet the team pages
4. Differentiate as much of content as you can and add extra sections where unique content can be added.
5. Don't replicate your backlinking strategy
6. Based on the areas targeted, find out about how effective geo redirects would be
7. Stress the address/location targeted via content, directories, G Maps
Simply flood the websites with a lot of unique content, change or at least reword what can be reworded. Make % of the duplicated content as minimal as you can.
I hope this helps. Challenging. Good luck!
Katarina
-
Thank you! When I add photos, should I name them with locations in mind? Or are you saying that by having different photos, the search engines will recognize different content?
Also - the employees and leadership are the same, even the external partners are the same. But I could be careful about how employee bios are added - so the content is not duplicate, but unique on each site, so that's a good resource for unique content, if I plan carefully and keep it in mind. Thank you!
Driving directions are written out on the local site (the national site is digital), but I am thinking I might be able to reference a location in the testimonial or home city of the person offering the testimonial.
-
My friends this is a big challenge for you as MichaelAMG mentioned, if you do not care about the content of the sites both will hurt each other. So this are some tips for multi-location businesses do to help improve their location pages
1. Use testimonials
2. Write out driving directions
3. Create employee bios
4. Add photos -
You feel my pain! LOL, thanks. We are trying to rewrite content now, but their product offering (how they name their products, describe them, etc). are IDENTICAL. The business partners they link to and how they describe those offers are IDENTICAL. The most I can hope for is to never mention the city of the parent organization on the national site, EVER and to mention it A LOT on the city based site. We are hoping a top level blog with posts containing lots of city based v. national based keywords will help some, too. Do you think if I pair weekly geo-sensitive blog posts with improved geo-sensitive page content, I will have a chance of defining separate content for "near me" geolocation purposes? We are working on robust on page content with the proper geolocation keyword references now.
-
That sounds rough. What you will want to do is alter your content for your single city based website to reflect that you serve that city, then when Google is looking for a match for a person near that city, it should see that site as the best match do to the weight it puts on geolocation. In the long run, you will want to re-write all of your content on one site so that your two sites will not be hurting each other or look like copy/paste spam sites.
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
-
Why is Amazon crawling my website? Is this hurting us?
Hi mozzers, I discovered that Amazon is crawling our site and exploring thousands of profile pages. In a single day it crawled 75k profile pages. Is this related to AWS? Is this something we should worry about or not? If so what could be a solution to counter this? Could this affect our Google Analytics organic traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
My website is penalized from google with no message in GWT.
On 26 of October 2018 My website have around 1 million pages indexed on google. but after hour when I checked my website was banned from google and all pages were removed. I checked my GWT and I did not receive any message. Can any one tell me what are the possible reasons and how can I recover my website? My website link is https://www.whoseno.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhoseNo0 -
Company Name in Home Page Title? If and Where?
My guess is you want to do the {title} | {company name} format as I would suspect Google gives slightly more weight to the words at the beginning of the title? (This is assuming your company name isn't a generic word or you are specifically trying to rank your home page for your company name when it isn't ranking well already) But what about cases where you have like 5 or 6 keywords that are really important and used in the title gives you like 50 characters and your company name pushed it up to like 65 increasing the chance Google will use some other source to list the name of your home page in the search results? Obviously one can experiment, but wondering what the general consensus is - long keyword title, or longer title with company name? The company name can be included in the meta description and the domain name of the url displayed also gives the indication to the company. But maybe the algo "respects" long itles that have company name more than ones without as then it looks more like a keyword stuffing title? So many factors to consider. Yes - on page SEO isn't just about the title, but for this thread I'm just talking home page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wizkids9641 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Problems in indexing a website built with Magento
Hi all My name is Riccardo and i work for a web marketing agency. Recently we're having some problem in indexing this website www.farmaermann.it which is based on Magento. In particular considering google web master tools the website sitemap is ok (without any error) and correctly uploaded. However only 72 of 1.772 URL have been indexed; we sent the sitemap on google webmaster tools 8 days ago. We checked the structure of the robots.txt consulting several Magento guides and it looks well structured also.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | advmedialab
In addition to this we noticed that some pages in google researches have different titles and they do not match the page title defined in Magento backend. To conclude we can not understand if this indexing problems are related to the website sitemap, robots.txt or something else.
Has anybody had the same kind of problems? Thank you all for your time and consideration Riccardo0 -
How to Submit My new Website in All Search Engines
Hello Everyone, Can Any body help to suggest Good software, or Any other to easily Submit my website , to All Search Engines ? ? Any expert Can help please, Thanx in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative0 -
Why my website disappears for the keywords ranked, then reappears and so on?
Hello to everyone. In the last 2 weeks my website emorroidi.imieirimedinaturali.it has a strange behavior in SERP: it disappears for the keywords ranked and then reappears, and so on. Here's the chronicle of the last days: 12/6: message in GWT: Improvement of the visibility of the website in search. 12/6 the website disappears for all the keywords ranked 16/6 the website reappears for all the keywords ranked with some keywords higher in ranking 18/6 the website disappears for all the keywords ranked 22/6 the website reappears for all the keywords ranked 24/6 the website disappears for all the keywords ranked... I can't explain this situation. Could it be a penalty? What Kind? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emarketer0 -
New Website Launch - Traffic Way Down
We launched a new website in June. Traffic plummeted after the launch, we crept back up for a couple of months, but now we are flat, nowhere near our pre-launch traffic or previous year's traffic. For the past 6 months our analytics have been worrying us - Overall traffic and new visitor traffic is down over 10%, bounce rate is up almost 35% since site launched, keywords aren't ranking where they used to, and of course, web sales are down. Is this supposed to happen when a new site is launched, and how long does a new this transition last? We have done all the technical audits, adding relevant content, we're at a loss. Any suggestions where to look next to improve traffic to pre-launch numbers?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WaySEO0