Duplicate Content Question With New Domain
-
Hey Everyone,
I hope your day is going well. I have a question regarding duplicate content.
Let's say that we have Website A and Website B. Website A is a directory for multiple stores & brands. Website B is a new domain that will satisfy the delivery niche for these multiple stores & brands (where they can click on a "Delivery" anchor on Website A and it'll redirect them to Website B). We want Website B to rank organically when someone types in " <brand>delivery" in Google. Website B has NOT been created yet.
The Issue
Website B has to be a separate domain than Website A (no getting around this). Website B will also pull all of the content from Website A (menus, reviews, about, etc).
Will we face any duplicate content issues on either Website A or Website B in the future? Should we rel=canonical to the main website even though we want Website B to rank organically?</brand>
-
Great pleasure - good luck with it all!
-
Great response Nigel and thank you so much for your insight!
-
Hi imjonny
I'm glad you have asked around to be honest. Like I said, I would.
You are right that even if you canonicalize ultimately Google will decide whether to rank a page it deems to be important and can ignore the canonicalization. If the canonical isn't bona fide then it could call in to doubt the other canonicals on your site which would be a strong negative signal for SEO and lead to a drop in trust.
So - it depends on what you want to rank for.
Let's say you have Product A on site A and you then have an equivalent checkout page on site B. Then you can't try and rank for the term Product A because it just isn't going to happen. We've already said that we will need to canonicalize that page anyway to the equivalent page on site A.
The only thing you can hope to do is rank for 'Delivery Options', 'Branded Delivery' The Big 'Delivery Option Site'
What you can't do is try and rank for the product names, It will be impossible. But then why would you want to? Surely the important thing is to maintain rank for site A's products with site B being more of a slave site - solely functional.
Ultimately you would be canonicalizing the product pages not the whole site so maybe there are other pages that you can add. Maintenance, Technology, How to etc But frankly they would suit Site A anyway because if I am buying a product I want as much info as possible before purchase, not on the delivery page.
Oh and don't create branded content for site B because once again you will crave up site A.
I know it's a big conundrum but I haven't seen anything like you are trying to do so can only generalise on best practice.
I hope that helps!
Regards
Nigel
-
Hi Nigel,
I got some more responses from other sources and it seems like duplicating a new site IS a bad idea.
Let's say we canonical to website A so that Google knows that the main page is on site A. Would Website B have chances to index & rank? I've heard that canonical is just a signal to Google. Google will ultimately determine which page they will want to show even if the canonical is there. Is this true?
-
The bigger the site the bigger the potential loss. No SEO in my honest opinion would snaction what you are thinking no matter how big the site is.
Like I said - cast the question wider than here. It's shame that other SEOs haven't come on to help you with your thinking.
-
Hi Nigel,
Thanks for the response again! I understand that you may have had sites that had shared content, but what was the scale of these websites? Do you think if Website A was a huge authority that this issue won't be as big of a deal?
We're talking millions of sessions per month.
-
Hi
I have had sites myself with shared content and the end result was that neither of them ranked at all. They were set up in a pre-Penguin world (before 2011) and when the update really cut in September 2012 I lost 60% of my traffic in one day.
I have also worked on many sites who shared content across their own pages resulting in the same collapse in SERPS - You can read about the biggest mistake that website owners make here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
In certain circumstances, you can share others' content by way of syndication. You'll see it on MOZ occasionally. They will have produced a great article and at a later date will share it across some other article sites as the authority will have been established as a MOZ article. Note that these are small'ish articles, not whole sites.
What you are talking about is basically, willingly, creating a duplicate site to site A. If you do that your rankings on site A will fall and site B will never gain any rank at all if the content pages are duplicates.
Yes, a competitor could damage your site if they were so inclined. Negative SEO is the practice of sharing your content to a number of sources thereby creating mass duplication. While Google should recognise yours as the original that is rarely the the case.
Duplicate content is at the very core of SEO. If someone is telling you differently then they are wrong.
However, it is your website and I would completely agree with your strategy of playing devil's advocate. If it was my site I would want as much corroboration as possible. So go and ask other SEOs but make damn sure they know what they are talking about and it isn't a 'bloke down the pub! because it can cost you hugely.
We probably lost £½m through our own naivete - never again!
Regards Nigel
-
Hi Nigel,
Thanks for the response again! I have a few questions:
- Why do you think I will destroy Site A? If that logic is true, theoretically, wouldn't you be able to copy someones site 100% and cause it to get destroyed?
- Have you seen any examples of this before?
I don't mean to neglect your advice, I'm just hearing different things from different people and need an accurate response in order to make the right decision.
-
If you use Website A content then you must canonicalize otherwise you will destroy the site (A). If you want B to rank independently then it MUST have original content.
This is how it works I'm afraid. Get help from a copywriter, or a few if that helps keep the cost down,
Regards
Nigel
-
Hey Nigel,
Thanks for your answer! Just to give some reference, Website A is currently up and has been up for a long time. It is getting A LOT of traffic and we don't want to risk anything on website A which is ranking REALLY well. Also, Website B is being made because of legal issues (can't really get into it) but it's best if we keep them as separate entities.
Because we're looking at scale for 1000s of pages to rewrite content, that doesn't seem like an option. And yes, we will be pulling all of the content from Website A to Website B.
Is the only solution to create completely new content for Website B? Will I face any issues with Website A at all whichever strategy I choose?
-
Hi imjonny
You are going to have a major problem trying to get these two sites listed at all in my opinion.
1. You are creating a multi-brand/store website in website A with menus reviews and about the stores & brands.
2. When someone clicks the brand delivery on website A they will be directed to site B. - presumably, because site B handles all of the shipping and checkout processes.If site B pulls the information from site A then you will kill both sites. I presume when you say 'pull' you mean it will also have that information on the pages?
So you are creating an unindexable monster that no amount of canonicalization, redirecting or iframe manipulation will help.
Presumably, you need to rank for site A but that is not possible if you are pulling content into site B. The only sensible thing I can think of is.
1. Canonicalize 'Store 1' on Site B to the equivalent store page on Site A. So store 1 on Site B effectively does not exist at all.
2. Call Store B - 'Brand Delivery' and write acres of content about delivering brands on the home page and a load of supporting pages. You just won't rank for anything on the second site apart from 'Brand Delivery' and any contextually similar words.
It's a weird way of setting stuff up. If I were shopping on a site I would not want to go to a different site to check out. You will have two sites to manage presumably with the same NAP - (site ownership and address) as well so that will not help.
The only way is to keep the two sites content mutually exclusive and use canonicals which of course can be done between different URLs.
If it was me I would keep site A and ditch the B idea but ho hum!
Kind Regards
Nigel
-
Unfortunately, there is no way around it
I think, imo, the best option is to just use the same domain, but that is really something we aren't able to do.
iframe sounds interesting, but we do still want the content (at least the menu of products) indexed.
Changing the content is also out of the question. Way too hard to scale with how many we would have to change.
-
Hey. If you rel=canonical I don't see how these pages would rank anymore. You're basically telling google that the other pages are the better ones. Is there no going around the duplicate content? This is a really strange / problematic situation.
I think your best bet is either using some sort of iframe if that's an option (it doesn't necessarily need to look bad). Or do your best to change content.
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
-
Redirect to new SSL Domain
Hi Experts; How to redirect https://old-domain.com to https://new-domain.com without buying new SSL? I have one GoDaddy SSL and I want to use it for a new domain. Its currently use for old domain
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Ticket Industry E-commerce Duplicate Content Question
Hey everyone, How goes it? I've got a bunch of duplicate content issues flagged in my Moz report and I can't figure out why. We're a ticketing site and the pages that are causing the duplicate content are for events that we no longer offer tickets to, but that we will eventually offer tickets to again. Check these examples out: http://www.charged.fm/mlb-all-star-game-tickets http://www.charged.fm/fiba-world-championship-tickets I realize the content is thin and that these pages basically the same, but I understood that since the Title tags are different that they shouldn't appear to the Goog as duplicate content. Could anyone offer me some insight or solutions to this? Should they be noindexed while the events aren't active? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keL.A.xT.o1 -
HELP! How does one prevent regional pages as being counted as "duplicate content," "duplicate meta descriptions," et cetera...?
The organization I am working with has multiple versions of its website geared towards the different regions. US - http://www.orionhealth.com/ CA - http://www.orionhealth.com/ca/ DE - http://www.orionhealth.com/de/ UK - http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/ AU - http://www.orionhealth.com/au/ NZ - http://www.orionhealth.com/nz/ Some of these sites have very similar pages which are registering as duplicate content, meta descriptions and titles. Two examples are: http://www.orionhealth.com/terms-and-conditions http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/terms-and-conditions Now even though the content is the same, the navigation is different since each region has different product options / services, so a redirect won't work since the navigation on the main US site is different from the navigation for the UK site. A rel=canonical seems like a viable option, but (correct me if I'm wrong) it tells search engines to only index the main page, in this case, it would be the US version, but I still want the UK site to appear to search engines. So what is the proper way of treating similar pages accross different regional directories? Any insight would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Duplicate Content Question
We are getting ready to release an integration with another product for our app. We would like to add a landing page specifically for this integration. We would also like it to be very similar to our current home page. However, if we do this and use a lot of the same content, will this hurt our SEO due to duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NathanGilmore0 -
Moving some content to a new domain - best practices to avoid duplicate content?
Hi We are setting up a new domain to focus on a specific product and want to use some of the content from the original domain on the new site and remove it from the original. The content is appropriate for the new domain and will be irrelevant for the original domain and we want to avoid creating completely new content. There will be a link between the two domains. What is the best practice for this to avoid duplicate content and a potential Panda penalty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Citybase0 -
Penalised for duplicate content, time to fix?
Ok, I accept this one is my fault but wondering on time scales to fix... I have a website and I put an affiliate store on it, using merchant datafeeds in a bid to get revenue from the site. This was all good, however, I forgot to put noindex on the datafeed/duplicate content pages and over a period of a couple of weeks the traffic to the site died. I have since nofollowed or removed the products but some 3 months later my site still will not rank for the keywords it was ranking for previously. It will not even rank if I type in the sites' name (bright tights). I have searched for the name using bright tights, "bright tights" and brighttights but none of them return the site anywhere. I am guessing that I have been hit with a drop x place penalty by Google for the duplicate content. What is the easiest way around this? I have no warning about bad links or the such. Is it worth battling on trying to get the domain back or should I write off the domain, buy a new one and start again but minus the duplicate content? The goal of having the duplicate content store on the site was to be able to rank the category pages in the store which had unique content on so there were no problems with that which I could foresee. Like Amazon et al, the categories would have lists of products (amongst other content) and you would click through to the individual product description - the duplicate page. Thanks for reading
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Coupon Website Has Tons of Duplicate Content, How do I fix it?
Ok, so I just got done running my campaign on SEOMOZ for a client of mine who owns a Coupon Magazine company. They upload thousands of ads into their website which gives similar looking duplicate content ... like http://coupon.com/mom-pop-shop/100 and
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Keith-Eneix
http://coupon.com/mom-pop-shop/101. There's about 3200 duplicates right now on the website like this. The client wants the coupon pages to be indexed and followed by search engines so how would I fix the duplicate content but still maintain search-ability of these coupon landing pages?0