Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicating an existing website - new name and reskin
-
Would re-skinning, duplicating an exising ecommerce website with a new domain name cause any ranking issues?
The plan would be that all product data, pricing info etc would be identical, the site would have a minor redesign to change colours, logos etc and all duplicate content would be rel=canonicaled to the original site.
In case you are wondering the reason for this is a customer with an existing site wants to try out a new brand without incorporating a massive development costs.
The majority of traffic would be driving through google shopping, a bit of PPC, social etc.
Is this site duplication likely to harm the original site or will setting up rel=canonical to point to the original site going to be sufficient enough to prevent this happening?
Is there anything else is should consider?
Many thanks for your help
-
I suppose one easy way via robots.txt would be a NoIndex / Disallow across all content on the new site. And with this you would only measure new brand/page design.
If you are not really that interested about SERPs but the user traffic and the look and feel, why don't you try A/B testing?
I think running two different domains will not really validate much as you are not covering indexing (due to canonicals) and will probably only rank on the new domain/brand for your landing pages.
-
Hi Gerd
Thanks for the reply and suggestions.
My biggest concern is not with the new site, I am more concerned with the impact this might have on the existing site.
My logic being that if we rel=canonical any duplicate content to the existing site we would minimize or even eliminate any impact.
Justin
-
Is the intention to eventually get rid of the old domain/brand (provided that the new one is successful)?
Duplicating a domain would mean that you would pay extra for PPC (driving different brand terms) and would also mean that the reskinning would include some brand-term landing pages.
I don't think your new site will take off from an SEO perspective - especially considering that it will take about 4-8 weeks for the index to properly build out and you will only know about any duplicate content issues after it happened.
I think "trying out a new brand" is a bit dangerous, by just duplicating content on another domain and slapping a new skin on it. Unless of course the current domain does not have much SEO value with regards to branded keywords.
Depending on the number of products I think it would be better to pull up the new domain with a set of landing pages (preferably covering some of the most revenue-driving and least revenue-driving products) and a set of product pages with canonicals to the new domain and sitemap for the selected set of products and then setup PPC and funnels and do a side-by-side comparison.
If the new domain/SERPs/conversion performs better, 301 the old domain to the new one and move your products over. Anything else feels like being half-pregnant
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
-
How can I avoid duplicate content for a new landing page which is the same as an old one?
Hello mozers! I have a question about duplicate content for you... One on my clients pages have been dropping in search volume for a while now, and I've discovered it's because the search term isn't as popular as it used to be. So... we need to create a new landing page using a more popular search term. The page which is losing traffic is based on the search query "Can I put a solid roof on my conservatory" this only gets 0-10 searches per month according to the keyword explorer tool. However, if we changed this to "replacing conservatory roof with solid roof" this gets up to 500 searches per month. Muuuuch better! The issue is, I don't want to close down and re-direct the old page because it's got a featured snippet and sits in position 1. So I'd like to create another page instead... however, as the two are effectively the same content, I would then land myself in a duplicate content issue. If I were to put a rel="canonical" tag in the original "can I put a solid roof...." page but say the master page is now the new one, would that get around the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
How to Submit My new Website in All Search Engines
Hello Everyone, Can Any body help to suggest Good software, or Any other to easily Submit my website , to All Search Engines ? ? Any expert Can help please, Thanx in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
New Site: Use Aged Domain Name or Buy New Domain Name?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterwhitewebdesign
I have the opportunity to build a new website and use a domain name that is older than 5 years or buy a new domain name. The aged domain name is a .net and includes a keyword.
The new domain would include the same keyword as well as the U.S. state abbreviation. Which one would you use and why? Thanks for your help!0 -
Website stuck on the second page
Hi there Can you please help me. I did some link building and worked with website last couple of months and rank got better but all keywords are on the second page, some of them are 11th and 12th. Is there anything I did wrong and google dont allow the website on the first page? Or should I just go on. It just looks strange keywords are on the second page for 2 weeks and not going to the first page for any single day. The website is quite old, around 10 years. Anyone knows what it is or where I can read about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fleetway0 -
Should I Use City Name in URL?
Having a website designed for a car dealership and deciding what attributes to use in the URL. Should I include the city name in the URL? Or does that help for SEO purposes? Other ideas of what to research or try are appreciated too. Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylesuss0