Two Sites Similar content?
-
I just started working at this company last month. We started to add new content to pages like http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/49/-/181/1137/Bridgestone-Motorcycle-Tires. This is their main site. Then i realized it also put the new content on their sister site http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/1137/Bridgestone-Motorcycle-Tires. the first site is the main site and I think will get credit for the unique new content. The second one I do not think will get credit and will more than likely be counted as duplicate content. We are changing this so it will no longer be the same. However, I am curious to see ways people think we could fix this issues? Also is it effecting both sits for just the second one?
-
Google is a joke ever since Penguin and Panda so I hope my real example shows you that you can't leave anything up to them.
-
Yes that makes perfect sense. I was thinking that; however, I liked your insight that they would pick the wrong site. Just cause they are picking the right site now does not mean they will continue too. Thanks for pointing that out.
-
I would never assume that Google will give credit to the rightful owner. We published an infographic on guest blogging months ago and several people picked it up. Our company STILL doesn't get the recognition it deserves: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Beginners+Guide+to+Guest+Blogging&pws=0&hl=en&num=10
We in fact aren't even on the first page which blows my mind.
It's going to be a pain in the butt but you'll need to differentiate those pages to a fair degree and disassociate them as much as you can if they are trying to rank for the same keyword. Google may just see one of them as too similar and ignore one of the domains all together, or just certain pages.
I suppose using a canonical tag could resolve this, but it will still make one of the sites next to meaningless. If you want both sites to perform, you'll need to treat them as truly different sites, with different content, different pages, different hosting, etc.
Does that help?
Kevin Phelps
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinwphelps
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
-
Concerns of Duplicative Content on Purchased Site
Recently I purchased a site of 50+ DA (oldsite.com) that had been offline/404 for 9-12 months from the previous owner. The purchase included the domain and the content previously hosted on the domain. The backlink profile is 100% contextual and pristine. Upon purchasing the domain, I did the following: Rehosted the old site and content that had been down for 9-12 months on oldsite.com Allowed a week or two for indexation on oldsite.com Hosted the old content on my newsite.com and then performed 100+ contextual 301 redirects from the oldsite.com to newsite.com using direct and wild card htaccess rules Issued a Press Release declaring the acquisition of oldsite.com for newsite.com Performed a site "Change of Name" in Google from oldsite.com to newsite.com Performed a site "Site Move" in Bing/Yahoo from oldsite.com to newsite.com It's been close to a month and while organic traffic is growing gradually, it's not what I would expect from a domain with 700+ referring contextual domains. My current concern is around original attribution of content on oldsite.com shifting to scraper sites during the year or so that it was offline. For Example: Oldsite.com has full attribution prior to going offline Scraper sites scan site and repost content elsewhere (effort unsuccessful at time because google know original attribution) Oldsite.com goes offline Scraper sites continue hosting content Google loses consumer facing cache from oldsite.com (and potentially loses original attribution of content) Google reassigns original attribution to a scraper site Oldsite.com is hosted again and Google no longer remembers it's original attribution and thinks content is stolen Google then silently punished Oldsite.com and Newsite.com (which it is redirected to) QUESTIONS Does this sequence have any merit? Does Google keep track of original attribution after the content ceases to exist in Google's search cache? Are there any tools or ways to tell if you're being punished for content being posted else on the web even if you originally had attribution? Unrelated: Are there any other steps that are recommend for a Change of site as described above.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PetSite0 -
Duplicate Content: Is a product feed/page rolled out across subdomains deemed duplicate content?
A company has a TLD (top-level-domain) which every single product: company.com/product/name.html The company also has subdomains (tailored to a range of products) which lists a choosen selection of the products from the TLD - sort of like a feed: subdomain.company.com/product/name.html The content on the TLD & subdomain product page are exactly the same and cannot be changed - CSS and HTML is slightly differant but the content (text and images) is exactly the same! My concern (and rightly so) is that Google will deem this to be duplicate content, therfore I'm going to have to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of all subdomain pages, pointing to the original product page on the TLD. Does this sound like the correct thing to do? Or is there a better solution? Moving on, not only are products fed onto subdomain, there are a handfull of other domains which list the products - again, the content (text and images) is exactly the same: other.com/product/name.html Would I be best placed to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of the product pages on other domains, pointing to the original product page on the actual TLD? Does rel cannonical work across domains? Would the product pages with a rel cannonical tag in the header still rank? Let me know if there is a better solution all-round!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Where is the best place to put a sitemap for a site with local content?
I have a simple site that has cities as subdirectories (so URL is root/cityname). All of my content is localized for the city. My "root" page simply links to other cities. I very specifically want to rank for "topic" pages for each city and I'm trying to figure out where to put the sitemap so Google crawls everything most efficiently. I'm debating the following options, which one is better? Put the sitemap on the footer of "root" and link to all popular pages across cities. The advantage here is obviously that the links are one less click away from root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" (e.g. root/cityname) and include all topics for that city. This is how Yelp does it. The advantage here is that the content is "localized" but the disadvantage is it's further away from the root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" and include all topics across all cities. That way wherever Google comes into the site they'll be close to all topics I want to rank for. Thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content
Hi, I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another. For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this. One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content. Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Duplicate site (disaster recovery) being crawled and creating two indexed search results
I have a primary domain, toptable.co.uk, and a disaster recovery site for this primary domain named uk-www.gtm.opentable.com. In the event of a disaster, toptable.co.uk would get CNAMEd (DNS alias) to the .gtm site. Naturally the .gtm disaster recover domian is an exact match to the toptable.co.uk domain. Unfortunately, Google has crawled the uk-www.gtm.opentable site, and it's showing up in search results. In most cases the gtm urls don't get redirected to toptable they actually appear as an entirely separate domain to the user. The strong feeling is that this duplicate content is hurting toptable.co.uk, especially as .gtm.ot is part of the .opentable.com domain which has significant authority. So we need a way of stopping Google from crawling gtm. There seem to be two potential fixes. Which is best for this case? use the robots.txt to block Google from crawling the .gtm site 2) canonicalize the the gtm urls to toptable.co.uk In general Google seems to recommend a canonical change but in this special case it seems robot.txt change could be best. Thanks in advance to the SEOmoz community!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OpenTable0 -
Separate Site or should we incorporate it into our main site
Hello, We have a website to sell personal development trainings. The owners want to start 2 blogs - one for each owner - that promotes their personal coaching practices. What's the SEO advantages of embedding both blogs in the current site vs starting 2 brand new blogs with their names as the domain names?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Domain w/ Identical Content to Site we are Optimizing
Hi Guys, We've been optimizing a client's site for about a year or so now and on a call the other day the client brought up that he owns and operates another site that's marketing the same product, but to a difference audience (we work on the direct to consumer side, this is a distributior focused site),with the same exact content as the site we are optimizing. Obviously this is a major duplcant content issue and we need to get it resolved very quickjly. We have already reccomendt to the client that we re-write content, but this is where my questions comes in - Which site should we rewrite the content on? The site we are optimizing is the more impoorant of the two, while we still want the other site to hold rankings we dont want to end up accidently optimizing the other site wherein the site we are working on full time suffers a lost when a "compeiting" site creates compeltely new content and may, accidentally, end up ranking higher than the site we are focusing on full time. As links also play a role, would that be a KPI to look at here in determining which site gets new content and which does not? In this scenairo, would would you guys recommend? Just want to make sure I'm dotting all my I's, and crossing T's here. Many thanks to all in advance, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Havas_Disco0 -
Duplicate page Content
There has been over 300 pages on our clients site with duplicate page content. Before we embark on a programming solution to this with canonical tags, our developers are requesting the list of originating sites/links/sources for these odd URLs. How can we find a list of the originating URLs? If you we can provide a list of originating sources, that would be helpful. For example, our the following pages are showing (as a sample) as duplicate content: www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=11 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=12 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=15 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=2 "How did you get all those duplicate urls? I have tried to google the "contact us", "news", "video" pages. I didn't get all those duplicate pages. The page id=87 on the most of the duplicate pages are not supposed to be there. I was wondering how the visitors got to all those duplicate pages. Please advise." Note, the CMS does not create this type of hybrid URLs. We are as curious as you as to where/why/how these are being created. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dlemieux0