Hosting two websites
-
Hi guys,
I work with a company that has a business to consumer (B2C) website and a business to business (B2B) website selling the same product.
The content will differ but the structure / templates will be similar across both sites.
Any recommendations or suggested reading to ensure both sites appear in Search?
Many thanks in advance!
Richard
-
No Problem Richard - Glad I could help - as you say two sites is twice the work to manage and market so it dilutes your effort.
Good luck with your new project
-
Great stuff Matt, many thanks, much appreciated.
The B2B website has been live a few months, while the B2C website is just built and goes live in a few days.
I only started with them this week so no involvement in their decision to build a second website, however the B2B domain name would not be appropriate for a B2C market.
I would suspect in the months time they may integrate & redirect the B2B domain to the B2C domain (using 1:1 301's). Having just one domain would be much better for SEO (and day to day website management to).
Many thanks again Matt, you're a star!
Richard
-
Hi Richard - one quick question - are your sites going to be on separate domains and are these domains going to be linking to each other? I am just wondering whether you are trying to keep both sites completely separate or whether you are making it clear that they different parts of the same business? If so have you thought about having both sites on one domain with your homepage making it clear there are two separate areas you service - B2B and B2C? By doing this you will benefit in the long run from a more powerful link profile and therefore greater domain authority and ranking ability - one link will benefit both sides rather than just one domain if you have them separate. It is better to try and build one rich information resource for customers than split it in to several in my opinion. However this all depends on whether having both sides of the business sat under their own folder on one domain is appropriate to your whole customer base? Doing this would also resolve any potential concerns you may have about hosting mulitple websites under separate domains on one server. You often see sites that are trying to sell to customers and to potential resellers having both types of content for the same product on one site rather than separate.
If you have them separate and both rank well you are likely to get customers looking at each site anyway when carrying our research in the SERPs.
However if this is an issue then let put your mind at ease - there shouldn't be a problem with having two separate sites on separate domains as you are making sure that the content is unique. Obviously just make sure you don't have a mass of links between the two. A link to acknowledge their relation is fine though. The only time there would be an issue is if you are trying to hide the relationship from Google and you aren't as you are trying to serve to different customer bases with unique content. Shared hosting on the same IP is very common these days and the only time it has been an issue in the past is when one site on that IP has been penalised. This impacted on other sites - however this even seems to be less common now with more sites appearing and more shared hosting..
I am just trying to find out why you have chosen the structure you have from an SEO viewpoint and making it easier to build authority for your companies web presence.
-
Many thanks for that.
I was thinking perhaps there might be some hosting issues to be aware of?
-
If the content differs then you will be fine. There are literally millions of sites using the same structure and template. Just make sure all your content is original and it doesn't reflect similar content on both sites.
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 removed from Bing and Yahoo
Hello, Our website howtoremove.guide was recently removed from the Bing and Yahoo index. The first thing we did was contact Bing Webmaster support to ask what the issue was since we did not get any notifications or messages in our webmaster dashboard. The email that we got back said “I have escalated the issue to our engineers and will get back to you once I receive an update.” Since then, we haven't received any word back from them, but we did not find any technical problems and we strongly believe we were manually penalized. We've never had issues with a search engine before, so we are at a loss what to do. Could you please give us advice as to what technical issue our website might have or what could incur a deindex penalty in our case? We want to do everything that is possible to get back into Bing and Yahoo search results ASAP. The website has primarily affiliate content, so we are doing anything we can to clean everything up, but any recommendations will be incredibly useful to us. We are also open to contacting an expert on this, but we have no idea where to look.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThreatAnalyzer0 -
Problem with Google finding our website
We have an issue with Google finding our website: (URL removed) When we google "(keyword removed)" in google.com.au, our website doesn't come up anywhere. This is despite inserting the suitable title tag and onsite copy for SEO. We found this strange, and thought we'd investigate further. We decided to just google the website URL in google.com.au, to see if it was being properly found. Our site appeared at the top but with this description: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We also can see that the incorrect title tag is appearing. From this, we assumed that there must be an issue with the robot.txt file. We decided to put a new robot.txt file up: (URL removed) This hasn't solved the problem though and we still have the same issue. If someone could get to the bottom of this for us, we would be most appreciative. We are thinking that there may possibly be another robot.txt file that we can't find that is causing issues, or something else we're not sure of! We want to get to the bottom of it so that the site can be appropriately found. Any help here would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Website Suddenly dropping rank
Morning Moz Fans: My URL is: http://goo.gl/Dhbjwj According to MOZ, which we are tracking this URL with, somewhere between the 3rd Feb and 10th the domain went from being fairly well indexed to being dropped to pages further back than 6-7, for pretty much everything, even the company name was only registering at the bottom of page one. Around this time we were transferring the website from .php into wordpress, so we were creating new pages, called by the same names and all the same content but we created the wordpress area in a sub domain of the website. Again around this time we had an issue with the blog area and had to take it down for 4-5 weeks due to some errors which meant google wouldn't have been able to crawl these pages properly, but the rest of the website was up and running. We also discovered recently that the company have and use this domain http://goo.gl/5JvDUH So my question is, what do you think caused the problem? has it been premaritally penalised? is there a way I can get google to specifically look at it and is there any more i can do?Thank you for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | popcreativeltd0 -
Urls in Bilingual websites
1-I have a bilingual website. Suppose that I am targeting a page for keyword "book" and I have included it in that page url for the English version: English version: www.abc.com/book Can I use the translation of "book" in the second language of the website url instead of "book" ? Please let me know which of the following urls are right " French Verison: www.abc.com/fr/book or www.abc.com/fr/livre livre=Book in French 2- Does Google have any tool to check if the second language page of the website has exactly the same content as the English version. What I want to do is for example for a certain page in English version, my targeted keyword is "book" . So my content would be around books. But in the French version of this page, I want to focus on keyword "Pencil" in French instead of "book". Is it wrong or any consequences? That was the main reason for the question number one. Because if it is ok to do what I explained in item 2 then I will set my urls like: In English : www.abc.com/book In French: www.abc.com/fr/crayon crayon=Pencil in French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
Website not being indexed after relocation
I have a scenario where a 'draft' website was built using Google Sites, and published using a Google Sites sub domain. Consequently, the 'same' website was rebuilt and published on its own domain. So effectively there were two sites, both more or less identical, with identical content. The first website was thoroughly indexed by Google. The second website has not been indexed at all - I am assuming for the obvious reasons ie. that Google is viewing it as an obvious rip-off of the first site / duplicate content etc. I was reluctant to take down the first website until I had found an effective way to resolve this issue long-term => ensuring that in future Google would index the second 'proper' site. A permanent 301 redirect was put forward as a solution - however, believe it or not, the Google Sites platform has no facility for implementing this. For lack of an alternative solution I have gone ahead and taken down the first site. I understand that this may take some time to drop out of Google's index, however, and I am merely hoping that eventually the second site will be picked up in the index. I would sincerely appreciate an advice or recommendations on the best course of action - if any! - I can take from here. Many thanks! Matt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | collectedrunning0 -
Submitting XML Sitemap for large website: how big?
Hi there, I’m currently researching how I can generate an XML sitemap for a large website we run. We think that Google is having problems indexing the URLs based on some of the messages we have been receiving in Webmaster tools, which also shows a large drop in the total number of indexed pages. Content on this site can be accessed in two ways. On the home page, the content appears as a list of posts. Users can search for previous posts and can search all the way back to the first posts that were submitted. Posts are also categorised using tags, and these tags can also currently be crawled by search engines. Users can then click on tags to see articles covering similar subjects. A post could have multiple tags (e.g. SEO, inbound marketing, Technical SEO) and so can be reached in multiple ways by users, creating a large number of URLs to index. Finally, my questions are: How big should a sitemap be? What proportion of the URLs of a website should it cover? What are the best tools for creating the sitemaps of large websites? How often should a sitemap be updated? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Hosted email newsletters
Hi! I just checked the WMT account for one of my clients, and I noticed their web dev's site has 2.6k links pointing to it. These seem to be from their hosted HTML newsletters, such as http://imail.illusionmedia.co.uk/t/r-l-diurkky-dtakrkki-b/. They redirect to the the main site, but are used for tracking. The client recently got an unnatural link warning, even though their profile looks OK to me. Is there a chance that these links could have anything to do with it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Website architecture and sitewide link
Hello, I was reading this article about website architecture http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo and I have a question about site wide link... I don't think site wide link are good if you want your homepage to have the most " juice " can someone confirm that to me. What I mean by site wide link is let's say I have a page about golf in califorina and I create a link to another page of my website which is about golf in florida that a good practicee to do that or not ? I just used this calculator http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php and and if I do site wide links the juice doesn't go to my most important page ( the homepage ) which is the one I currently want to have the most juice. However, I noticed that website like amazon do site wide link let's say you are looking at a book and they have lots of links for other books or categories and they still rank very well for the word "textbooks" so I am kind of lost and don't understand why they still rank even though to me their juice goes away by doing site wide links to other books or categories ( even though it is related ) Can someone tell me more about site wide links are they good , bad etc... and is this calculator I use right or wrong ? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0