I have 2 websites with the same content
-
Hello everyone, this is my first post here on SEOmoz and I have a questions that I cannot seem to figure out. So here is my scenario:
I have 2 websites that are identical. The only difference between the 2 websites is the domain name. This was done a while back for marketing purposes, however, I am no longer needing my 2nd website. What is the best way to get rid of this second website? I still have about 1 paying customer a day convert on this 2nd website and I do not want to loose them, however, I know that I am getting penalized by the search engines because of this duplicate content. Please let me know the best way of going about this.
PS: I have read about 301 redirects, canonicalizing URLs, and other methods but do not know which one to choose. Any help is greatly appreciated!
-
Hi threebiz,
First, welcome to the community! Look forward to seeing you around in the future
Since there is a small loss of "link juice" when you apply a 301 redirect, you should pay attention to which domain you choose to redirect and which you keep as the primary domain.
Your choice may be influenced by suitability for branding, but if there is no real branding advantage in using one or the other, then I would make sure that I redirect the site with the lesser Domain Authority to the one with the greater.
You can use Open Site Explorer to check Domain Authority (DA) for both domains. You can learn more about DA under Metrics, Link Counts and Data Points.
If for example, you have Site A with a DA of 30 and Site B with a DA of 20, then I would redirect Site B to Site A, since this allows you to maintain the full domain strength of the site with the greater prospect of ranking.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Awesome. Is there anything else anybody can think of that needs to be done? I just want to do this correctly. Thanks for the response
-
In Webmaster Tools, use the Change of Address function.
-
Michelleh speaks truth.
-
Okay great. Do I need to do anything with my Google Webmaster tools account to let them know that I am moving my website? Thanks again!
-
Choose one site. 301 re-direct all content from the site you want to remove to the new site.
Make sure to re-direct to each corresponding page (don't re-direct to all URLs to the home page).
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
-
Website Migration Query
We are going to migrate our site but we cannot do this gradually, so before we complete the whole migration, we were thinking of launching the new site on a sub-domain and gradually redirect traffic to the sub-domain, starting with 10%, moving up steadily so that we then migrate to the new site within four/five weeks. The new site will have a new URL structure on the same domain, with a complete re-design and the IP address will be changing as well, even though the server geographical location will remain the same. a) Should we noindex the new sub-domain while the new site is on trial? b) Are there any other issues we should look out for? Thanks in Advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | seoec0 -
Non Moving #1 Website
Hi Guys, Bit of an odd one we have recently undertaken our SEO in house (6-7 Months) and since doing this have had some great results, we have identified our competitors utilising Ahrefs, Moz and other tools that we have selected. However we have come up against something that we really cannot work out. One of our competitors ranks for everything related to there term on their website and industry at position #1 They are not actively doing SEO, Poor backlink structure from the research that we have carried out No fresh content being generate I was wondering if someone would perhaps mind spending 5 mins having a quick look to see what you think as i can't think what we might have missed. Tim.
Technical SEO | | fordy0 -
Development Website Duplicate Content Issue
Hi, We launched a client's website around 7th January 2013 (http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk), we originally constructed the website on a development domain (http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk) which was active for around 6-8 months (the dev site was unblocked from search engines for the first 3-4 months, but then blocked again) before we migrated dev --> live. In late Jan 2013 changed the robots.txt file to allow search engines to index the website. A week later I accidentally logged into the DEV website and also changed the robots.txt file to allow the search engines to index it. This obviously caused a duplicate content issue as both sites were identical. I realised what I had done a couple of days later and blocked the dev site from the search engines with the robots.txt file. Most of the pages from the dev site had been de-indexed from Google apart from 3, the home page (dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk, and two blog pages). The live site has 184 pages indexed in Google. So I thought the last 3 dev pages would disappear after a few weeks. I checked back late February and the 3 dev site pages were still indexed in Google. I decided to 301 redirect the dev site to the live site to tell Google to rank the live site and to ignore the dev site content. I also checked the robots.txt file on the dev site and this was blocking search engines too. But still the dev site is being found in Google wherever the live site should be found. When I do find the dev site in Google it displays this; Roller Banners Cheap » admin dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/ A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. This is really affecting our clients SEO plan and we can't seem to remove the dev site or rank the live site in Google. In GWT I have tried to remove the sub domain. When I visit remove URLs, I enter dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk but then it displays the URL as http://www.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk. I want to remove a sub domain not a page. Can anyone help please?
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
As a wholesale website can our independent retailer's website use (copy) our content?
As a wholesaler of villa rentals, we have descriptions, images, prices etc can our agents (independent retailers) use the content from our website for their site or will this penalize us or them in Google rankings?
Technical SEO | | ewanTHH0 -
Does turning website content into PDFs for document sharing sites cause duplicate content?
Website content is 9 tutorials published to unique urls with a contents page linking to each lesson. If I make a PDF version for distribution of document sharing websites, will it create a duplicate content issue? The objective is to get a half decent link, traffic to supplementary opt-in downloads.
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
Duplicate Page Content
I've got several pages of similar products that google has listed as duplicate content. I have them all set up with rel="prev" and rel="next tags telling google that they are part of a group but they've still got them listed as duplicates. Is there something else I should do for these pages or is that just a short falling of googles webmaster tools? One of the pages: http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/walnut-countertop-9.html
Technical SEO | | JAARON0 -
How damaging is duplicate content in a forum?
Hey all; I hunted around for this in previous questions in the Q&A and didn't see anything. I'm just coming back to SEO after a few years out of the field and am preparing recommendations for our web dev team. We use a custom-coded software for our forums, and it creates a giant swathe of duplicate content, as each post has its own link. For example: domain.com/forum/post_topic domain.com/forum/post_topic/post1 domain.com/forum/post_topic/post2 ...and so on. However, since every page of the forum defaults to showing 20 posts, that means that every single forum thread that's 20 posts long has 21 different pages with identical content. Now, our forum is all user-generated content and is not generally a source of much inbound traffic--with occasional exceptions--but I was curious if having a mess of duplicate content in our forums could damage our ability to rate well in a different directory of the site. I've heard that Panda is really cracking down on duplicate content, and last time I was current on SEO trends, rel="canonical" was the hot new thing that everyone was talking about, so I've got a lot of catching up to do. Any guidance from the community would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | TheEnigmaticT0 -
Similar Content vs Duplicate Content
We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Izoox0
