Competitors have local "mirror" sites
-
I have noticed that some of my competitors have set up "mirror" homepages set up for different counties, towns, or suburbs. In one case the mirror homepages are virtually identical escept for the title and in the other case about half of the content id duplicate and the other half is different. both of these competors have excellent rankings and traffic. I am surprised about these results, does anyone care to comment about it and is this a grey hat technique that is likely to be penalized eventually.
thx
Diogenes
-
They both have massive numbers of backlinks and domains linking in. What do you think?
Looking at the NY site, it has a total of 2300 links from 46 domains. That is not a lot at all. One site wide footer link can offer 10k+ links from a single site. The focus should be on the number of linking domains which is 46 in this case.
When I review the links for this site in OSE, they seem quite natural. There are a couple legal directories but nothing unexpected. The anchor text varies nicely and the link profile is what I would expect to find. For OSE I usually apply the following filters: followed+301, only external, on this root domain, group by domain. Take a look for yourself and I think you will agree there doesn't seem to be anything unusual.
This NY site is not setting up "mirror" sites, but landing pages. Mirror sites are basically identical sites set up under different domains. Landing pages are pages within a site designed to welcome visitors who locate your site through specific search terms or marketing ads.
If this was my SEO client, I would advise them to increase the amount of unique content on their landing pages. I am not comfortable at all with these pages in their current form. With that said, Google apparently is comfortable with them and is indexing these pages.
The site's DA is 31, and PA around 30 for these pages. These sites are very easily beatable with proper SEO work. If I were in your position I would be very pleased to compete with these sites. No matter what site you build, you are going to have competition in SERPs.
What results are you concerned about? I presume you are searching for the exact phrases in their domain name? These types of sites usually do well in domain name match searches, but otherwise they don't fare well. If you offer a basic site with good content and solid SEO, you will solidly beat these types of sites every day.
-
Sorry I didn't make myself clear. These sites are not related but both use the same strategy. Look at the footer links. Incidentally I came accross another thread in this forum where another lawyer (coincidentally) was complaining that the more he optimized the lower his rankings. The answer was that he was creating a lot of duplicate content by trying to set up separate pages for each town and village. Maybe the 2 sites don't work because of the strategy but despite it. They both have massive numbers of backlinks and domains linking in. What do you think?
Paul
-
Thanks for the URLs Paul.
The two examples you offered are two unique websites. I looked at the IPs of both sites and they are completely different. The WhoIs site registration information is completely different. The web design of each site is completely different. The NY site is a wordpress website while the other site seems to be based off a basic site template. Without reviewing the content, there appear to be two completely unique websites.
When I look at the content provided on these pages, it is not duplicated at all. One site has a video, the other does not. They even have different addresses and phone numbers. Even under scrutiny these sites have the appearance they are completely unrelated. If these two sites represent the same company, they certainly did a good enough job of differentiating them to earn them both a place in the search indexes.
-
-
Hi Paul.
You mentioned that half of the content was duplicate, while half was unique. These pages may be unique enough to be considered as original pages. There are many factors involved and it is not possible to share much more in a generic Q&A without reviewing the sites.
To answer your question to Brian, a dynamic web page in this context is one where the content changes based on user information. For example, if you are connecting from Dallas, Texas then the web page would display the weather in Dallas, local news, etc. for that given area. If you then connected to the same site from Miami, Florida the weather and local news would be given for Miami. That would be one example of a dynamic web page.
In short, it is entirely possible to offer localized landing pages for specific areas in a white hat manner. It is of course also possible to do so using black hat techniques. Based on the 50% variance of content and the fact their performance is doing well, it sounds like they may be doing things in an acceptable manner. We need the URLs for the main and local sites to offer further insight.
-
Well, unfortunately I do not know what a dynamic landing page is, or how to tell. So, could you enlighten me and then we would be closer to the answer?
thx
diogenes
-
Are any of these dynamic landing pages?
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
-
Server and multiple sites
We have multiple sites selling similar products in different ways but have always kept them separate on the off chance that google does not like it or they penalize one site. We have always put them on different servers but now thinking for performance as they are on shared hosting to put them on a single server which would be our own but we do not know the SEO considerations. We can assign multiple IPs to a server but I am not 100% sure whether there is still a negative impact of running multiple sites on the same server even if from a different IP. Any help would be appreciated, what I am really asking is could if they are on the same server with different IP's be still linked together by google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
What would you say is hurting this site, Penguin or Panda?
Would you say this is both Penguin and Panda and no penalty has ever been lifted? What would be your general recommendations for this site? seWnoQm
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
How would you optimize a new site?
Hi guys, im here to ask based on your personal opinion. We know in order to rank in SEO for a site is to make authority contents that interest people. But what would you do to increase your ranking of your site or maybe a blog post? leaving your link on blogs comment seem dangerous, nowadays. Is social media the only way to go? Trying to get people to write about you? what else can be done?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
Bad keywords sending traffic my site, but can't find the source. Advice?
Hi! My site seems to be the target of negative SEO (or some ancient black hat work that's just now coming out of the woodwork). We're getting traffic from keywords like "myanmar girls" and "myanmar celebrities" that just started in late June and only directs to our homepage. I can't seem to find the source of the traffic, though (Analytics just shows it as "Google," "Bing," and "Yahoo" even though I can't find our site showing up for these terms in search results). Is there any way to ferret out the source besides combing through every single link that is directing to us in Webmaster Tools? I'm not even sure that GWT has picked up on it since this is fairly new, and I'd really love to nip this in the bud. Thoughts? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 199580 -
Obscene anchor text linking to non-existent pages on my site
My website seems to be rapidly accumulating links from what seem to be reputable websites and which are going to non-existent pages on my website. The anchor text of many of these links is obscene. Here is the URL of one of the pages that is linking to me. I contacted the originating site a couple of weeks ago and they are looking into it but I've not heard back. I'm guessing the originating sites have been hacked. Should I be concerned? Why are they linking to pages on my site that don't exist? http://www.radicalartistsagency.com/htmlarea/language/0content_abo_utus.html Looking at the page source of this page reveals the hidden links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MartinDS0 -
Does 301 redirection will effect my site in the future?
Hello Guys, I am totally new to SEOMOZ.com, when I had issues with my website I asked one of my friend who does SEO he suggested me to implemented 301 redirection approximately 11 months a go, here is the URL of the website http://www.bharatdesi.com/hyderabad . Will Google ban my website from search engine results, what would be the worst scenarios. know there are really good SEO people who follow SEOMOZ everyday... Can any one here please suggest me with some good answers weather I have to remove 301 redirection or I can still keep the same until my home page gets redesigned. I don't really understand all the concepts of SEO, but if some one can help me with the good answers I can ask my developer to the same. Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Vinss0 -
My site has disapeared from the serps. Could someone take a look at it for me and see if they can find a reason why?
my site has disappeared from the serps. Could someone take a look at it for me and see if they can find a reason why? It used to rank around 4 for the search "austin wedding venues" and it still ranks number three for this search on Bing. I haven't done any SEO work on it in a while so i don't think i did anything to make Google mad but now it doesn't even rank anywhere in the top 160 results. Here's the link: http://austinweddingvenues.org Thanks in advance Mozzers! Ron
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ron100 -
Competitors Developing Spammy Link For My Website
Well Guys there are lot of discussions in almost all the communities, blogs, forums about Post Penguin impact. Google says that if find that you're involved in any link building activities, we may penalize you. People out there have already started their developed links. But what if our competitors would have developed those links. Initially it was okay to develop one way links, I even developed lot of quality, but deliberately, links. around 95% links are placed manually, if return to some favor or money but all links looks natural. Most of the links I developed through content only, like articles, blog comments, PR submission, etc now really skeptical about the quality (after hearing lot of talks and reading n number of posts). Now, can I also submit my competitor's websites in 1000 topic directory (obviously not in any spammy directory), would it effect that website adversely? What if I spun an existing content and submit it into 500 article directories and give backlink to competitor site from using only one anchor text (which is obviously the main keywords - highest sales generating keyword) I look forward to some experts comments.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Khem_Raj70