Duplicate Content and Indexing issues
-
Hey guys,
I have a client whom has an existing site www.currentdomain.ie and we have created a new site with a new domain name www.newdomain.ie.
They do not wish for it to be redirected. They wish for two sites to have the exact same content just with different logos. So for example if you search for current domain the search results present to you www.currentdomain.ie as the number 1 search listing and the same if you searched for their new domain.
I'm trying to understand how google might index the two sites if side wide canonical tag were implemented on either of the sites to get over the duplicate content issue.
How would google index the brand name of each site if one site canocilised?
I don't want to encourage this client with this idea as it appears to be nonsensical but I thought I should first understand fully what the SEO implications might be.
Thanks
Rob
-
Thanks Peter, I agree entirely. Have sent the mail to the client. Hopefully they will see some sense.
-
To add to what Tom said (and I endorsed his answer) - if Google honors the cross-domain canonical (and it's not a guarantee), then the non-canonical domain would fall out of the rankings (or, at least, certain pages would). Clients don't like to hear that, but the alternative is two domains competing with each other. At best, Google is likely to filter out one of the domains anyway (even without canonicals or redirects). At worst, there's potential for a Panda-scale penalty. There's very little to gain from this scenario, and a lot to lose, IMO.
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your response. I shall relay this information to my client.
Cheers
Rob
-
Hi Rob
Agree with you that it's not an ideal solution, but to answer your query:
In an ideal world, the site-wide canonical tag would instruct Google to ignore one domain in terms of SEO/PageRank. It would not necessarily deindex the site pointing to the new site, but it would be severely devalued in ranking - basically so it wouldn't appear for search terms. I wouldn't be able to tell you if it would also stop ranking the site for the brand term - if I had to put money on it, I think it would keep its ranking for the brand term, but this is far from certain.
Furthermore, as canonical tags act as a suggestion, rather than a direct order to the crawler, having two sites with identical content could theoretically still run the risk of a Panda penalty. It's unlikely, but it can't be ruled out. To rule out that risk, adding noindex robot tags to the webpages would do the trick, but I guess that sort of defeats the point.
As you can see, the whole solution is fraught with uncertainty and risk. In theory it could work, but not everything goes according to plan.
If I was in your shoes, I'd also push for a different solution as you have mentioned.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Google detects wrong information to compnay's knowledge graph on search index - Please help
This issue is about website properties' information showing on Google's search index with brand keywords. We have 8 different domains that operated separately in 8 countries. All are responsible for their individual domain. When I Google it with our brand name 'Flight Centre' in Google.ca, Google's search index shows company website link with flightcentre.com and detects all information, social profile etc.. from Flight centre Australia. Please see the screenshot. How to change this information that Google shows or detects website link and all other properties from flightcentre.ca? Anybody about with a quick answer would be awesome? IqWeymZ
Branding | | flightcentre200 -
Brand Migration Issues
My company is in the midst of a brand transition and is experiencing some difficulties in migrating web content to a parent company domain. When content from the old domain was migrated to the parent, there were rel-canonicals set on top level pages of the old domain referencing its equal on the parent destination. Then each sub-page was redirected to the parent company. What I have found is that the only pages that indexed on the partent domain were the top level pages. I am having a hard time figuring out why the sub-pages won't index. Does anyone have advice on how to handle this? Would reactivating the old URLs and setting rel-canonicals help? Also when should 301 redirects be implemented?
Branding | | Lexmark_Web_Strategy0 -
Best practices to rank a new website that does not produce much content.
Hi What would be the best practice for ranking a new site .. lets say a business site that does not have a blog to produce regular content in it. Building backlinks are not just the options when these days people are all focused in content marketing. And specially, when you are competing against big competitors. Big competitors are of course getting their contents published on bigger sites since they are already established. No one will talk about you when you are new in the market. And you still need to bring up your site to people and SEO is the only option for that. What would you suggest ? Thanks
Branding | | MindlessWizard0 -
Blogging/content strategy
While personal blogging & branding is pretty typical for those in a service/b2b industry, when it comes to CEOs/owners of retail businesses - not so much. We have a company blog right now that is heavy on company news and updates - and will be working towards being more informational/educational. But, in the meantime, it's difficult getting the ok to contribute to contributor based article/resource sites - such as http://smallbiztrends.com, since the business blog, by nature, is promotional. (our clients are both business & consumer) Assuming, we can generate enough content, my suggestion is to have the owner create a personal blog which will be purely information and educational, and use that blog to account for the owner's expertise and use those articles as means to get accepted as a contributor at highly prized sites. At the same time, we would still have a business blog that combines educations & company news/promotional. Does this seem like a sound strategy? or is it better to just build up the company blog as an educational resource. Will reputable sites be ok with an educational company blog?
Branding | | S.S.N0 -
Are templates considered duplicate content?
We have a line of products that are all using the same template or shell for a website structure. All have different content relating to a specific product or service, but being its a line of different products under one family, we use the same colors and template structure for consistency and branding purposes. It was just brought to my attention that using a template like this across multiple sites could raise duplicate content flags as google is reading the same template code and may not differentiate that its a family product line of sites. Does anyone have any feedback on whether this could be true or not?
Branding | | anthonytjm0 -
Has anyone had success with product page rel=author? Can I protect the content but dump the face on the SERPS?
Hi, Is there a way to get the benefits of rel=author for protecting site content but to disconnect that from the face photo on the SERPS? We added rel=author to our unique and individually written product descriptions and reviews. This has led to a decrease in click thru thus far. I suspect this is because when searching for a product to buy the user sees the face and thinks "review" or at least "not corporate". I don't nec. want to dump rel=author in the sea yet for our ecom pages, has anyone had success with product page rel=author? Four our keywords, we are the only company of 10 well known travel sites that have the face in the SERPS, far from improving our CTR, it has trashed it. Any ideas?
Branding | | xoffie0 -
List Quick and Dirty places to seo-tag images/content for new brands
I'm helping a new brand (service industry) to try to dominate the first page for their own name. They have a name that also exists in another state AND a negative Yelp review which (shows up #4, whilst they show up #1 on google unpersonalized search). Aside from Linkedin/Facebook/twitter, what are good places to Tag Images and have them show up under the search for this company's name. This is a picture/heavy industry (jewelry) and I'm looking to create profiles on several sites that would immediately show up if I tag the content properly. Are quora/pinterest good choices? I need to grab-bag as many properties as possible. Secondary question: would these properties on quora etc, respond well to exact-match anchor text links to shoot them past the negative yelp rating that is showing up #4 for their brand?
Branding | | ilyaelbert0 -
Converting Site Content to Different Niche and in Different Language
Background STORY: I'm a wordpress theme designer, and i have a 3 years old wordpress-based site in english language with more than 100 post. Let's just called this site "olddomain.com" (generic brand name, didn't have keyword on it) Almost all of content are just showcase post and download link for my Free Wordpress Theme Download. So the site is lacking in terms of quality article content. I never doing any SEO work (keyword targeting,etc) for this "olddomain.com ", but the site backlinks is growing viral since the beginning, perhaps due to the nature of a "freebie" site. Using the OSE, it showed 12,850 Total Links from 349 Linking Root domain. Back when Y! Site Explorer still exist the number of linked domain is around 64,000+ links, and google webmaster tools show the number of 655,000+ Links. It's now has PageRank 5 (for almost a year) , with Home Page Authority 62/100 and Domain Authority 55/100. But in terms of traffic and revenue, the site is doing pretty bad. I only got less than 3000 visit per month. Revenue less than $10/month from adsense, and generated less than $1000 over the last 2 years from premium wordpress theme affiliate program. Some people told me that i have to add more article to attract traffic. but the thing is, i don't really good on writing english article, It's not my native language, so i can't really express my thought. I know i can outsource article writing, but i feel more comfortable and affordable if i write from my own mind. RECENT STORY: For the last 3 months i also learn more about SEO and internet marketing , and recently doing some local keyword research in my native language (Indonesian) with google keyword tools combine with SEOmoz keywords analysis. I found more than 100+ of Indonesian keywords in multi-niche with more than 3000+ Exact local search/month. And after using SEOmoz keyword analysis, almost all of them are in relatively low competition level under 40% . So The Potential is HUGE. MY IDEA: I want to create a new multi-niche informational content-rich website based on the keywords i found on my language. Something like about.com, squidoo, or hubpages. My question is : 1. Should i completely start that site in a "newdomain.com" completely from scratch (No Pagerank, Backlinks, PA, DA) ? or I just use my existing "olddomain.com" which already got the link advantage (Pagerank 5 with thousands of backlinks) and just recreate the site-structure and put the new article content on it, although it's on different niche and different language . 2. What's the effect for search engine if you changing your site content to different niche (from wordpress theme to Multi-niche Informational website) and also to a different language (english to indonesian) Best Regards,
Branding | | thefaizal
Faizal0