Clone sites at new company
-
I just came in house to our company for SEO. We have one main site and 182 that are exact duplicates and almost exact clones of the main site.
It's no surprise that half of these clones are deindexed already. The meta tags are just the domain name URL. I want to add unique text on the home page to each site, fix the meta tags and switch them up so they aren't clones.
Other than a huge rewrite of the code for each site, I'm not sure what else to do to prevent the rest from getting deindexed.
Is there any way to prevent the rest from getting deindexed?
-
What about turning them into regional sites? A has inventory located in this state, B inventory only in that state, etc. So they are not exact clones.
-
Hi CFSSEO,
I'm going through some older Q&A questions and wondering how this project is going for you. Is there anything more we can do to help you convince management that 182 clones aren't in their best interest?
-
If I inherited these sites and didn't have a boss to answer to I would deindex all of them but one intentionally.
I would then redirect them all to the main site.
"and so they want to get something out of them now."
ha... I would allow them to expire and use the savings to buy beer. Savings is what you will get out of them IMO.
-
CFSSEO
It sounds as if someone in the past thought having multiple sites would improve things. There is no point in even redirecting these.
1. Keep your main site.
2. If one or two of the clones happen to have any PA, DA - from different links than you have on main, you should redirect those pages to the same page on the main site. (Highly likely they do not)
3. On the other sites, take them down. Save money and time on hosting, etc.
4. Teach those in your company it must be about content, etc. and quality links and focus like crazy on the one.
5. On the chance someone would later question this, I would do a screenshot on every one possible showing the traffic to the site over the last 6 months in GA. (This is to protect you).6. When the main site increases in traffic, etc. Demand a raise!!
Best
-
The main site has inventory, the clone sites also have the same inventory listings. I believe the hope was that with more clone sites, the inventory will get more traffic and more sales OMG! Of course, that hasn't happened, but time and money went into these domains and so they want to get something out of them now.
The sites provide value to the people listing their stuff for sale, and to the user who finds items to buy. The sites do not actually have any backlinks but all link to the main site.
I think the best to hope for would be for these clone sites to just count as more backlinks to the main site because they are not ranking anywhere on their own.
-
The main site has inventory, the clone sites also have the same inventory listings. I believe the hope was that with more clone sites, the inventory will get more traffic and more sales OMG! Of course, that hasn't happened, but time and money went into these domains and so they want to get something out of them now.
I think the best to hope for would be for these clone sites to just count as more backlinks to the main site because they are not ranking anywhere on their own.
-
I've got the same thoughts as Aran.
What are these 182 sites for? Why do they exist? What are they meant to achieve?
If these sites are deindexed, do they have any value? Do these sites get any traffic? Does the mainsite get any traffic via these sites (and is this traffic worth anything - does any of this traffic convert?
Do these sites have any inbound links?
If these sites provide no value, no links, no business etc then I would seriously question why you need them.
The effort required to get these sites up and running and delivering some value is almost certainly going to be better spent on your main site.
-
To what end do you want to use the other sites for?
Surely, its easier to optimise one site than hundreds?
Will rewriting the other sites benefit you and if so will the benefits outweight the amount of work required, or could that effort be applied elsewhere to beefit the main site?
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
-
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
New site failing to rank - could this be why?
I have a new client site that is not appearing anywhere in the top 100 for its main keywords. ASSUMING that this is not an issue with optimization or link quality, I am wondering whether it might be the following... The client's company has a parent company whose website has decent authority. This website links to the new (client) website. In addition, the 2 press releases we have done include links to both companies, since one was an outgrowth of the other. This is all 100% natural, so my inclination is that this is not causing the issue. But does anyone have any experience to suggest otherwise? That having website A linking to website B, and 50+ press release websites linking to both, could be causing the algorithm to throttle website Bs ability to rank? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
Pages that did NOT 301 redirect to the new site
Hi, Is there a tool out there that can tell me what pages did NOT 301 redirect to the new sites? I need something rather than going into google.com and typing in site:oldsite.com to see if it's still indexed and if it's not 301 redirecting.. I'm not sure if screaming frog can do that. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
On-site Search - Revisited (again, *zZz*)
Howdy Moz fans! Okay so there's a mountain of information out there on the webernet about internal search results... but i'm finding some contradiction and a lot of pre-2014 stuff. Id like to hear some 2016 opinion and specifically around a couple of thoughts of my own, as well as some i've deduced from other sources. For clarity, I work on a large retail site with over 4 million products (product pages), and my predicament is thus - I want Google to be able to find and rank my product pages. Yes, I can link to a number of the best ones by creating well planned links via categorisation, silos, efficient menus etc (done), but can I utilise site search for this purpose? It was my understanding that Google bots don't/can't/won't use a search function... how could it? It's like expeciting it to find your members only area, it can't login! How can it find and index the millions of combinations of search results without typing in "XXXXL underpants" and all the other search combinations? Do I really need to robots.txt my search query parameter? How/why/when would googlebot generate that query parameter? Site Search is B.A.D - I read this everywhere I go, but is it really? I've read - "It eats up all your search quota", "search results have no content and are classed as spam", "results pages have no value" I want to find a positive SEO output to having a search function on my website, not just try and stifle Mr Googlebot. What I am trying to learn here is what the options are, and what are their outcomes? So far I have - _Robots.txt - _Remove the search pages from Google _No Index - _Allow the crawl but don't index the search pages. _No Follow - _I'm not sure this is even a valid idea, but I picked it up somewhere out there. _Just leave it alone - _Some of your search results might get ranked and bring traffic in. It appears that each and every option has it's positive and negative connotations. It'd be great to hear from this here community on their experiences in this practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Elton0 -
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
How is my 301 redirected site stealing rankings from the main site?
Hello, I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com. Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms. What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
New site started ranking, lost ground after 301...?
Hi everyone. So we decided to re-brand a website starting with a fresh domain and fresh website (new everything). The first 4 weeks the site was performing really well and started bringing organic traffic for several targeted keywords (small amounts, but something). Around 5 weeks later, we decided to perform a 301 Redirect from an older site we had that really hadn't changed since 2007. As soon as we performed the 301, we started loosing ground on the keywords that were starting to perform. I may help to mention that we were targeting different keywords on the new site, versus the keywords/industry that were targeted on the older site... because we were focusing on another but similar industry. Now, 10 weeks later we are still not showing up for the keywords that we were starting to make headway on in the first four weeks of starting.... any ideas why? suggestions? The 301's were performed properly. We verified them, and we check Google WMT for any additional ones that may still be out there, but try to fix them as soon as possible. We have grown the site from just a few pages to over 60+ pages in the last 2 months with unique and fresh content targetting those keywords... Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
Press Release Sites
Ok, I am getting a lot of conflicting information about press release sites. i have been doing press release's for a while (mostly manually), I have also tried a few companies that claim to do it well (never do). After the Panda update the PR sites I have been using are just not as effective. Does anyone else have this problem or are there better PR sites that can be recommended.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBarker820