Why doesn't Google find different domains - same content?
-
I have been slowly working to remove near duplicate content from my own website for different locals.
Google seems to be doing noting to combat the duplicate content of one of my competitors showing up all over southern California.
For Example:
Your Local #1 Rancho Bernardo Pest Control Experts | 858-352 ...
<cite>www.pestcontrolranchobernardo.com/</cite>CachedYou +1'd this publicly. UndoPest Control Rancho Bernardo Pros specializes in the eradication of all household pests including ants, roaches, etc. Call Today @ 858-352-7728.
Your Local #1 Oceanside Pest Control Experts | 760-486-2807 ...
<cite>www.pestcontrol-oceanside.info/</cite>CachedYou +1'd this publicly. UndoPest Control Oceanside Pros specializes in the eradication of all household pests including ants, roaches, etc. Call Today @ 760-486-2807.
The competitor is getting high page 1 listing for massively duplicated content across web domains.
Will Google find this black hat workmanship? Meanwhile, he's sucking up my business.
Do the results of the competitor's success also speak to the possibility that Google does in fact rank based on the name of the url - something that gets debated all the time?
Thanks for your insights.
Gerry
-
As EGOL says, it isn't black hat.
It may be duplicate
If you think google cares about duplicate content on different domains, find an Associated Press story, then search for that headline.
You will find it on 100 sites. If google cared about duplicate content on multiple sites, none of those would show up in the serps.
However, and there is always a however... if they don't like your site for some other reason, they may bury your site in the results if you have duplicate content that appears on other sites.
-
I don't think that this is "blackhat". It is simply duplicate content that has a low chance of being filtered because it is on different domains which do not compete for identical keywords. Also, different phone numbers are used.
If you think that this method is highly effective you can do it too.
But, if you do it, you will still face the challenge of getting those sites to the top of the SERPs where there is a little competition. And, you will have some duplicate content risk.
If you have all of your different communities on the same domain you have an advantage on this company because you only have one domain to promote and any links that you get into that domain will benefit each of those communities all on one site.
Honestly, it sounds like your root problem is that you are unhappy that you must write unique content for each community. Maybe you should hire someone to do it for you? Or, if you are a real expert, why not write it yourself and give lots of useful information that might impress your potential clients and attract links? If you really want to smoke those guys maybe that's what you should do?
Just saying... if you do that you will still need offsite SEO to beat these guys. IMO they did some work to get these positions and you will have to match/defeat them.
====================
And, you are correct, Google currently seems to give a little bonus for keyword domains. It's not that great of an advantage. If you think that it is effective you can go out an buy a bunch of them and do the same thing as this guy is doing.
====================
If I was in your shoes I would be busy writing my content and looking for potential links in each community where you want to compete. You have the more effective strategy IMO, but you have not earned your SERPs yet.
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
-
Subdomain and Domain Linking Strategy
Here is my question for SEO. We are a mug printing company and we have a website specifically for bulk orders hosted at our main link (example.com). For the purposes of this example we will assume that we only print mugs for bands. Eg. orders for 100 mugs at a time for a band. We have had a need to create stores for bands so that they can then pass a link to their fans to purchase mugs. Our main website deals specifically with bulk orders only with customer provided logos, so extending this workflow to our main domain takes quite a bit of development time. Because of this, we purchased a service that allows us to create stores under the new domain stores.example.com. The root domain is the same as our main domain but there is “stores” in front of the domain. A band’s website that we would create would then look something like : stores.example.com/band1_merchandise These links are going to be spread by the band all over the web, and it is in my hope to be able to take advantage of this. Ideally stores.example.com/band1_merchandise being spread around will also give us a boost to www.example.com My question is how can we benefit the most from bands sharing the subdomain link such that our main website will be able to see an SEO benefit.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | masonwong0 -
How to find Spam Website?
Hi guys, I'm seo newbie and really want to find websites that hurt seo ranking to avoid get link. Which tools or trick can help me to find those site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | denakalami0 -
To buy or not to buy? Domains with history..
I am involved in setting up a new business which as of yet is to decide on a brand name.. As the availability of domain name in local tld (and ideally .com) is of so much importance, the brand naming process is inextricably linked to this. Therefore, upon finding a suggested name was available to register (without premium) there was a degree of satisfaction. However on looking at archive.org it was discovered that the .co.uk had been a sex/marital aid store back in 2004 and more recently in 2014 a travel blog / affiliate. Q is; Is the past history of what is a site with possible black hat links a reason to avoid registration? Or, does time cure all? And, is there a way in which domain health can be reliably confirmed? Thanks in advance for your input..
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
How does google know if rich snippet reviews are fake?
According to: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/reviews - all someone has to do is add in some html code and write the review. How does google do any validation on whether these reviews are legitimate or not?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wlingke0 -
Sudden influx of 404's affecting SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, We've recently updated a site of ours that really should be doing much better than it currently is. It's got a good backlink profile (and some spammy links recently removed), has age on it's side and has been SEO'ed a tremendous amount. (think deep-level, schema.org, site-speed and much, much more). Because of this, we assumed thin, spammy content was the issue and removed these pages, creating new, content-rich pages in the meantime. IE: We removed a link-wheel page; <a>https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Asuperted.com%2Fpopular-searches</a>, which as you can see had a **lot **of results (circa 138,000). And added relevant pages for each of our entertainment 'categories'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChimplyWebGroup
<a>http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians</a> - this page has some historical value, so the Mozbar shows some Page Authority here.
<a>http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands</a> - this is an example of a page linking from the above page. These are brand new URLs and are designed to provide relevant content. The old link-wheel pages contained pure links (usually 50+ on every page), no textual content, yet were still driving small amounts of traffic to our site.
The new pages contain quality and relevant content (ie - our list of Wedding Bands, what else would a searcher be looking for??) but some haven't been indexed/ranked yet. So with this in mind I have a few questions: How do we drive traffic to these new pages? We've started to create industry relevant links through our own members to the top-level pages. (http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians) The link-profile here _should _flow to some degree to the lower-level pages, right? We've got almost 500 'sub-categories', getting quality links to these is just unrealistic in the short term. How long until we should be indexed? We've seen an 800% drop in Organic Search traffic since removing our spammy link-wheel page. This is to be expected to a degree as these were the only real pages driving traffic. However, we saw this drop (and got rid of the pages) almost exactly a month ago, surely we should be re-indexed and re-algo'ed by now?! **Are we still being algor****hythmically penalised? **The old spammy pages are still indexed in Google (138,000 of them!) despite returning 404's for a month. When will these drop out of the rankings? If Google believes they still exist and we were indeed being punished for them, then it makes sense as to why we're still not ranking, but how do we get rid of them? I've tried submitting a manual removal of URL via WMT, but to no avail. Should I 410 the page? Have I been too hasty? I removed the spammy pages in case they were affecting us via a penalty. There would also have been some potential of duplicate content with the old and the new pages.
_popular-searches.php/event-services/videographer _may have clashed with _profiles.php/videographer, _for example.
Should I have kept these pages whilst we waited for the new pages to re-index? Any help would be extremely appreciated, I'm pulling my hair out that after following 'guidelines', we seem to have been punished in some way for it. I assumed we just needed to give Google time to re-index, but a month should surely be enough for a site with historical SEO value such as ours?
If anyone has any clues about what might be happening here, I'd be more than happy to pay for a genuine expert to take a look. If anyone has any potential ideas, I'd love to reward you with a 'good answer'. Many, many thanks in advance. Ryan.0 -
Redirect n domain to one
What happen when I redirect301 10 domain to one? I have 10 domain with ave Page Authority=45 and Domain Authority 60 and want to increase my new domain by redirect them. is it right or wrong?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vahidafshari450 -
How is this obvious black hat technique working in Google?
Get ready to have your minds blown. Try a search in Google for any of these: proform tour de france tour de france trainer tour de france exercise bike proform tour de france bike In each instance you will notice that Proform.com, the maker of the bike, is not #1. In fact, the same guy is #1 every time, and this is the URL: www.indoorcycleinstructor.com/tour-de-france-indoor-cycling-bike Here's the fun part. Click on that result and guess where you go? Yup, Proform.com. The exact same page ranking right behind it in fact. Actually, this URL first redirects to an affiliate link and that affiliate link redirects to Proform.com. I want to know two things. First, how on earth did they do this? They got to #1 ahead of Proform's own page. How was it done? But the second question is, how have they not been caught? Are they cloaking? How does Google rank a double 301 redirect in the top spot whose end destination is the #2 result? PS- I have a site in this industry and this is how I caught it and why it is of particular interest. Just can't figure out how it was done or why they have not been caught. Not because I plan to copy them, but because I plan to report them to Google but want to have some ammo.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
Influence of users' comments on a page (on-page SEO)
Do you think when Google crawls your page, it "monitors" comments updates to use this as a ranking factor? If Google is looking for social signs, looking for comments updates might be a social sign as well (ok a lot easier to manipulate, but still social). thx
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gt30