Dupicated Site Issues?
-
We are launching a new site for the Australian market and the URL will just be siteAU.com.
Currently the tech team (before we came on board) has it setup with almost exactly the same content (including the site css/nav/structure etc). Some product page content is slightly different, and category pages have different product orders, plus there are location pages that are specific to AU, but otherwise it's the same.
The original site: site.ca has been around for 6+ years, with several thousand pages and solid organic ranking (though the last few months have dropped )
Will the new AU site create issues for the original domain? We also have siteUSA.com which follows the same logic and has been live for a while.
-
if you want to rank competitively in the US and AU then I strongly recommend local domains.
In my experience, subfolders on a single domain are less effective then local domains. The above solution can work and you are at an advantage that your CA site is established and is the "parent" site.
It is more work to maintain separate domains, but in my experience of managing .com sites, we have always faced a challenge because despite the target setting in WMT, Google still struggles to rank the UK site in the UK over the US site in many instances because it is on a .com and because there is a US version of the site.
-
Could work well. We would have some additional content challenges, but still consolidated. e.g. now on the same domain we would have thousands of more pages for the city-specific areas. But we would have those anyway on separate domains. My question though is if we would face any more local ranking challenges. e.g. within canada we may already rank for 'plumbing service' for example. If everything is consolidated, we wouldn't rank 2X for the same search term, but if on different domains, we could - in the respective countries. Local modifiers like City Plumbing Service could still work.
-
To me this seems like the optimal solution. With this setup you are not only eliminating the possible duplicate content issues, but you still have information for each region on the site.
Or you could use your country specific domains as landing pages, and optimize them for their home country while still hosting the majority of your content on your main domain.
-
Thanks for the input. One alternative we are pondering is keeping everything on the primary domain with sections for the countries we serve. So primary is Canada then we also serve AU and USA. There may be some branding issues, along with technical challenges with our order processing, but it would probably allow us to better control content.
Thoughts on this?
-
If you set the targeting in Webmaster Tools to AU only and the others to their corresponding markets then you are unlikely to face any duplicate content penalties.
Additional measures you need to consider are:
Focus the majority of link building and PR to respective markets i.e. try and get a higher ratio of links from local sites
Put local physical addresses on each site e.g. on the AU site have an address in Australia.Generally speaking, you are still going to have some issues with your non AU sites outranking your AU site on Google AU, as do sites in the UK, but if you take the measures above then you are sending a strong signal to the search engines that you are not trying to spam them.
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
-
Redirecting Pages During Site Migration
Hi everyone, We are changing a website's domain name. The site architecture will stay the same, but we are renaming some pages. How do we treat redirects? I read this on Search Engine Land: The ideal way to set up your redirects is with a regex expression in the .htaccess file of your old site. The regex expression should simply swap out your domain name, or swap out HTTP for HTTPS if you are doing an SSL migration. For any pages where this isn’t possible, you will need to set up an individual redirect. Make sure this doesn’t create any conflicts with your regex and that it doesn’t produce any redirect chains. Does the above mean we are able to set up a domain redirect on the regex for pages that we are not renaming and then have individual 1:1 redirects for renamed pages in the same .htaccess file? So have both? This will not conflict with the regex rule?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nhhernandez0 -
SEO Indexing issues
Hi, We have been submitting sitemaps on a weekly basis for couple of months now and only 40% of the submitted pages are indexed each time. Whether on the design , content or technical side, the website doesn't violate google guidelines.Can someone help me find the issue? website: http://goo.gl/QN5CevThanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZeFan0 -
Website Redirection Issue
Hi All, Like to know is there any better way to do 301 redirection. My Client whose website name is Online Plants created with OpenCart. Over the period of time he added nearly 10,000's of products and now he is cleaning them ( by grouping similar attribute under one products) which is right way to do. For example , Product A with different size ( X,XL,XXL ) previously had 3 product entry ( A - X, A - XL, A - XXL ) , now he is moving all of them under one. So while moving he is deleting the other two entry. Now whats the best way to inform google . Putting a manual 301 redirection for each and every product is impossible as there are more products. Whats the best way to go ahead on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Verve-Innovation1 -
Google favoring old site over new site...
Hi, I started a new site for a client: www.berenjifamilylaw.com. His old site: www.bestfamilylawattorney.com was too loaded up with bad links. Here's the weird part: when you Google: "Los Angeles divorce lawyer" you see the old site come up on the 21st page, but Google doesn't even show the new site (even though it is indexed). It's been about 2 weeks now and no change. Has anyone experienced something like this? If so, what did you do (if anything). Also, I did NOT do a 301 redirect from old to new b/c of spammy links. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Site Structured Navigated by Cookies
Is it advisable to have a site structure that is navigated via URLs rather than cookies? In a website that has several location based pages - each with their own functions and information? Is this a SEO priority? Will it help to combat duplicate content? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Redirection strategy for mobile site
Hello folks! I am just about to launch a mobile specific version of our website. We were not able to make the main site responsive so have decided to make a seperate copy on an m dot subdomain. I have kept the url structure identical between both sites and added a canonical url on the mobile pages pointing to the desktop site. I will detect and redirect all mobile devices and googlebot mobile crawler to the m dot site. The questions i have are as follows... Is that the best approach if you use a mobile specific site on a seperate subdomain? What type of redirects should i use to send mobile users (and googlebot mobile) to the mobile site? My mobile site does not have all the pages the desktop site has. What happens if i redirect a mobile user from a page on the desktop site to a page on the mobile site that does not exist? (will give 404 currently). I guess i could maintain a list of valid mobile urls but this would be a pain (and a bit of an overhead) Your help is most appreciated Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertHill0 -
Reliable outsource site
Hi which is the most quality site to outsource my backlinks? freelancer.com odesk.com any other? From elance I am very disappointed. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Two Brands One Site (Duplicate Content Issues)
Say your client has a national product, that's known by different brand names in different parts of the country. Unilever owns a mayonnaise sold East of the Rockies as "Hellmanns" and West of the Rockies as "Best Foods". It's marketed the same way, same slogan, graphics, etc... only the logo/brand is different. The websites are near identical with different logos, especially the interior pages. The Hellmanns version of the site has earned slightly more domain authority. Here is an example recipe page for some "WALDORF SALAD WRAPS by Bobby Flay Recipe" http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1 http://www.hellmanns.us/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1 Both recipie pages are identical except for one logo. Neither pages ranks very well, neither has earned any backlinks, etc... Oddly the bestfood version does rank better (even though everything is the same, same backlinks, and hellmanns.us having more authority). If you were advising the client, what would you do. You would ideally like the Hellmann version to rank well for East Coast searches, and the Best Foods version for West Coast searches. So do you: Keep both versions with duplicate content, and focus on earning location relevant links. I.E. Earn Yelp reviews from east coast users for Hellmanns and West Coast users for Best foods? Cross Domain Canonical to give more of the link juice to only one brand so that only one of the pages ranks well for non-branded keywords? (but both sites would still rank for their branded keyworkds). No Index one of the brands so that only one version gets in the index and ranks at all. The other brand wouldn't even rank for it's branded keywords. Assume it's not practical to create unique content for each brand (the obvious answer). Note: I don't work for Unilver, but I have a client in a similar position. I lean towards #2, but the social media firm on the account wants to do #1. (obviously some functionally based bias in both our opinions, but we both just want to do what will work best for client). Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crvw0