3 Sites Covering Similar Topics & Panda
-
My question will take a bit of explaining, so here goes:
I have 3 blogs on the same server:
1. personal finance blog;
2. credit card blog;
3. prepaid credit card blog.
The personal finance blog is my flagship site started in 2007, which feeds my family and pays the mortgage. By contrast, the other two sites (started in 2008 and 2010) I would gladly kill if the result would help my personal finance blog.
In the fall of 2010 (before Panda) the prepaid card blog was penalized by Google. This has been confirmed by Google in response to a reconsideration request. Of course, they don't say why. I've tried a number of things and resubmitted the site, but with no luck.
Both the personal finance blog and credit card blog were hit by Panda 2 (April 11, 2011) and have not recovered.
While the personal finance site covers many topics (e.g., investing, credit, debt, money management), its income comes largely from credit cards. We review individual credit cards and have pages that list cards by category (e.g., balance transfer, cash back, travel).
The credit card blog does the same thing, but of course covers credit cards in more depth. There is a similar overlap between the prepaid card blog on the one hand, and the credit card blog and personal finance blog on the other. However, all content is unique.
I do not currently link between the sites, although until a few months ago I had blogroll links between the sites and a few (less than 10) content links.
If you've made it this far (and I hope you have), here are my questions:
1. Could the existence of the credit card and prepaid credit card sites be hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in Google, whether via Panda or otherwise?
2. If there is a reasonable chance that the answer to question 1 is yes, what would you suggest I do?
Of course, I could just take down the sites, but I wonder if there are other options.
One thought I had was to deindex the two card sites (I assume I can do this by disallowing googlebot via robots.txt) and give it time. Would Google treat this as if the sites did not exist? Both sites get a fair amount of traffic from bing and yahoo, so this option appeals to me. Of course, for all I know the existence of the two card sites are hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in bing and yahoo, too.
I thought about selling the sites, but if they are hurting my personal finance site, I grow concerned about how google distinguishes between a site being sold and a webmaster just trying to make the sites look like they are owned by different people. In this regard, I've never tried to hide the common ownership of the sites and have no intention of doing that now.
If I kill the sites, should I redirect them to my personal finance site? For the penalized prepaid card site, this seems both risky and unhelpful. But perhaps redirecting the credit card site is an option.
Given that the personal finance site is my livelihood, I greatly appreciate your thoughts on my dilemma.
-
I don't think the relationship of your other sites is having any effect on your rankings but it maybe Google post Panda is showing syndicated versions of your content as the most relevant. Finance and Making money online are very competitive niches and scraping/syndication is rife.
I recommend that you firstly make sure that when you publish your blog posts you are pinging pubsubhubbub to make sure Google knows you are the originating source.
Two questions:
Which landing pages and keywords have seen the biggest traffic change in the past 6-12 months?
Have you checked your competitor and your own link profiles for any recent changes ?
-
I don't think the content is duplicated, apart from some scrapers. I deal with the scrapers when I can, but I have to believe that the canonical tag and publication date take care of any issues.
As I said, I don't link between the sites anymore. I've had several people suggest that I move them to separate servers and even "hide" affiliate links by using redirects contained in folders that are blocked from search engines.
Maybe I'm naive here, but if I have to hide what I'm doing from search engines, I just don't do it.
-
Alan, appreciate the response. The more I think about it, I have to agree with your conclusion. There are plenty of companies that own multiple sites in the same vertical. It's well known, for example, that Bankrate owns creditcards.com and bankaholic. Each of these sites covers credit cards in depth.
-
I know what is like when you have a problem and can not find an aswer you start to see every thing as a potental cause, but I dont think it the other sites have anything to do with it.
-
I always look at these things the same...
If you have more than one site linking to other sites, ensure they are on a different server. OK, perhaps I am being overly cautious here, but knowing what Google can be like, I would not take chances.
If there are no links between the sites, then as long as the content is unique (as you say it is), then you have no problems from a duplication point of view. If each site serves a different purpose, there should be no problems.
I would need to look at the sites to get an idea why Panda hit them - there are so many possibilites. The main ones as we know though were thin or duplicate content and adverts.
Is there a possibility your content has been duplicated somewhere else?
Andy
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
-
SEO Impact & Google Impact On Removing Product From Category Page for Ecommerce Site
Hello Experts, For my Ecommerce site previously I was showing products at category pages i.e. first all subcategories name after that list all products of all subcateogries. That also approx per category 500 products via load more feature. My query is now I am planning to show products only at Product Listing Page and not on Category pages so what will be SEO impact and how google will treat this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johny123450 -
Mobile First Index: What Could Happen To Sites w Large Desktop but Small Mobile Sites?
I have a question about how Mobile First could affect websites with separate (and smaller) mobile vs desktop sites. Referencing this SE Roundtable article (seorountable dot com /google-mobile-first-index-22953.html), "If you have less content on your mobile version than on your desktop version - Google will probably see the less content mobile version. Google said they are indexing the mobile version first." But Google/ Gary Illyes are also on the record stating the switch to mobile-first should be minimally disruptive. Does "Mobile First" mean that they'll consider desktop URLs "second", or will they actually just completely discount the desktop site in lieu of the mobile one? In other words: will content on your desktop site that does not appear in mobile count in desktop searches? I can't find clear answer anywhere (see also: /jlh-marketing dot com/mobile-first-unanswered-questions/). Obviously the writing is on the wall (and has been for years) that responsive is the way to go moving forward - but just looking for any other viewpoints/feedback here since it can be really expensive for some people to upgrade. I'm basically torn between "okay we gotta upgrade to responsive now" and "well, this may not be as critical as it seems". Sigh... Thanks in advance for any feedback and thoughts. LOL - I selected "there may not be a right answer to this question" when submitting this to the Moz community. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile0 -
Traffic drop on this site
I am SEO'ing this site but need some assistance in the analysis. it was doing not too bad but in the last 4 months the google traffic has really fallen off, i suspect the keywords may need improving but any tips or observations would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crowng0 -
Duplicate ecommerce sites, SEO implications & others?
We have an established eCom site built out with custom php, dedicated SERPs, traffic, etc.. The question has arisen on how to extend commerce on social and we have found a solution with Shopify. In order to take advantage of this, we'd need to build out a completely new site in Shopify and would have to have the site live in order to have storefronts on Pinterest and Twitter. Aside from the obvious problem with having two databases, merchant processing, etc, does anyone know whether there are SEO implications to having two live sites with duplicate products? Could we just disavow a Shopify store in Webmaster Tools? Any other thoughts or suggestions? TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PAC31350 -
Why is this url redirecting to our site?
I was doing an audit on our site and searching for duplicate content using some different terms from each of our pages. I came across the following result: www.sswug.org/url/32639 redirects to our website. Is that normal? There are hundreds of these url's in google all with the exact same description. I thought it was odd. Any ideas and what is the consequence of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Will an inbound follow link on a site be devalued by an inbound affiliate link on the same site?
Hey guys, quick question I didn't find an answer to online. Scenario: 1. Site A links to Site B. It's a natural, regular, follow-link 2. Site A joins Site B's affiliate program, and adds an affiliate link Question: Does the first, regular follow link get devalued by the second affiliate link? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ipancake0 -
Site rankings down
Our site is over 10 years old and has consistently ranked highly in google.co.uk for over 100 key phrases. Until the middle of April, we were 7th for 'nuts and bolts' and 5th for 'bolts and nuts' - we have been around these positions for 5-6 years easily now. Our rankings dropped mid-April, but now (presumably as a result of Penguin 2.0), we've seen larger decreases across the board. We are now 5th page on 'nuts and bolts', and second page on 'bolts and nuts'. Can anyone please shed any light on this? Although we'd fallen some before Penguin 2.0, we've fallen quite a bit further since. So I'm wondering if it's that. We do still rank well on our more specialised terms though - 'imperial bolts', 'bsw bolts', 'bsf bolts', we're still top 5. We've lost out with the more generic terms. In the past we did a bit of (relevant) blog commenting and obtained some business directory links, before realising the gain was tiny if at all. Are those likely to be the issue? I'm guessing so. It's hard to know which to get rid of though! Now, I use social media sparingly, just Facebook, Twitter and G+. The only linkbuilding I do now is by sending polite emails to people who run classic car clubs that would use our bolts, stuff like that. I've had a decent response from that, and a few have become customers directly. Here's our link profile if anyone would be kind enough as to have a look: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com Also, SEOMOZ says we have too many links on our homepage (107) - the dropdown navigation is the culprit here. Should I simply get rid of the dropdown and take users to the categories? Any advice here would be appreciated before I make changes! If anyone wants to take a look at the site, the URL is in the link profile above - I'm terrified of posting links anywhere now! Thanks for your time, and I'd be very grateful for any advice. Best Regards, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone1 -
Similar Sites on Same Class C
Hi there, I asked a similar question a while ago - please pardon the dupe. I figured being more specific may help. Here's the scenario: I have two customers which sell very similar products. They both host with me so they are both on the same class C of ip addresses. Content on sites is similar due to the nature of the business/industry. There are no links between the two sites - they do not link to one another The HTML is about 50% the same, content near zero other than site structure. They have similar category structures. Question - could being on the same Class C adversely effect rankings of either. One site did particularly well until Panda came around and it's sloooowly coming back. Some advise has been given to the client that the IPs being on the same Class C is killing rankings. I am trying to either validate or refute the claim. All help/feedback appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisInColorado0