Competitor Ranking High has 2 Domains, But Duplicate Website ?
-
I was using OSE and noticed all the backlinks to one of our competitors is there other domain name, which is the EXACT SAME website. You can enter both url's and they display the same content. They are not useing any canonical tags either. Why are they not penalized for duplicate content? And for using there own website for backlinks ? We try to do everything right, but still cannot beat them.
Any thoughts on this?
-
Your competitors obviously knew what they were doing. This is what many would call Black Hat SEO, and while it can provide some good results in the short term, it's shady activity.
SEO should never be about gaming the SERPs. It should be about providing useful signals to search engines to tell them how to rank your pages.
Companies that do this type of stuff are only hurting themselves in the long run. I firmly believe if you continue to use solid white hat SEO techniques you'll come out on top of all of the gamers out there in the end.
Crime only pays until you get caught.
-
I can share a personal experience that might help clarify how the duplicate site issue works.
My site contains a sitemap which is automatically updated each day. When the new sitemap is created, Google and Bing are pinged. I also have a backup job scheduled to run daily. It is a perfectly standardized setup.
I wanted to do some testing with my site, so I restored my most recent backup to www.mydomain.com/test. The /test site was an exact duplicate of my domain. My lack of forethought was quite costly.
The /test site generated a sitemap, pinged the search engines, and was listed. In retrospect, I should have turned off the sitemap job and blocked the /test site in robots.txt. Worse, I didn't catch my error for over a month. While doing a search I noticed the result took me to the test site. After some troubleshooting I realized the error.
Bottom line, anyone can run two sites with identical information. The problem is that both sites will get listed. So if you have a 100 page site which is duplicated, then Site A might have pages 1 - 50 listed, and site B might have pages 51 - 100 listed. The problem is your domain authority is split between the two sites.
Ultimately the problem is fixed by 301'ing one site to the other. When that happens you will lose some link juice due to the 301.
Your competitor can rank well on both sites. But the same page wont rank well on both sites. Only one of the duplicated pages will appear in the SERP.
-
I believe that you are lucky that they run two websites. The reason... they have gotten backlinks into both of those domains instead of focusing ALL of their backlinks into a single domain. That divides their power instead of concentrating it.
So, I don't worry about competitors who think that they are going to build five websites in the same niche to kickass on me. Let them do it, divide their energy, divide their time and divide the backlinks.
I will start sweating when they redirect all of their satellite sites to the homesite.
-
Hey, the other site may well show up on a site:example.com query, but that does not mean it is ranking for key terms. Equally, it may seem that they are getting equity from the links, they may even be getting some, but I would suggest there is likely something else at play here.
It's practically impossible to give you a more definitive answer without the URL though. Happy to take a look if you want to private message it to me on here.
Marcus
-
Whoops. Actually they both appear in google that way but the cached domain is there main domain. Does that mean that it is parked?
-
Wait! But when I do site:example.com/ in google . both websites are still being picked up.
-
I would rather not. Private email possibly.
-
Your right. Actually Last year they both ranked, now I am only seeing there main website. But I still do not understand why if they were doing that, why were they not affected by that? I am bugged by this because it seems like they are receiving a lot of power from there backlinks which is there domain that is no longer ranking.
-
Can you provide the sites? It's pretty hard to tell without looking at them.
-
I used to have a few competitors who ran multiple identical sites - all linking to one another.
Today just one site remains. Duplicates are filtered from the SERPs.
My bet is that these competitors will have just one site in the SERPs by this time next year.
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
-
My competitor's sneaky link building technique
Hi, I can't figure out how my competitor seems to fit four invisible nav menus into her home page. If you view her page source and type "/about" for example, it shows five examples of the text linking to her "about" page. But four of them can't be located on the web page (they are hidden). How does she do this? She basically has four duplicate links that are counted for SEO but can't be seen on the webpage. address: http:// camilla peffer.com. au/ Any ideas?
Competitive Research | | SleekCopy0 -
Building a high-traffic website in a jobs-related domain
Hi, We are currently planning upon starting a website that’s targeted towards people looking for government jobs in India. Here are the primary / base keywords that we are targeting: Sarkari Naukri Government Jobs / Govt Jobs Latest Government jobs Banking Jobs Bank jobs Railway jobs Employment News IBPS SSC We’re confused that how should we go about ranking on top for these / long tail keywords around it? Because, we think that this is not a domain where you can write long and information-oriented posts (1400-1500 words) to crack SEO. People come to websites under this domain to look for latest jobs and that might or might not be around the high-traffic keywords mentioned above. Secondly, it might not be possible to write a lot of long & information-oriented content around these newer job posts. How do we go about building a high-traffic website in this domain? Thanks...
Competitive Research | | Shalin.TJ0 -
What's the best SEO way to benefit from your competitor's shutting down?
Hi ! Our main competitor is shutting down (website will be offline) at the end of the month and we are negotiating with them to buy their domain name: the idea would be to take advantage of their good rankings in the SERPs to redirect traffic to our pages (we're planning to crawl their site or get their sitemap and redirect th category / product pages to ours). The question is: for how long this strategy will be useful: days / weeks / months? (= for how long their pages will continue to appear in the SERPs from the day we enable the 301 redirections to our site?) Thanks in advance for your help! And if you have better suggestions, we're up to hear them of course.. 😉 Cheers
Competitive Research | | Kuantokusta0 -
Comparing 3 sites and their ranks
I am looking at 3 sites and what they have going for them and why they are ranking how they are. I would like to get some of your feedback on why certain sites are above other ones. One of these sites is a client of mine, I will not point out which one. The other 2 are just competitors. http://www.cornhole-game.org/cornhole-bags.html http://www.samscornholebags.com/ http://www.ajjcornhole.com/cornhole-bags.php I have compared them in OSE and they have PA of 39, 29, and 58 respectively. AJJ has a ton of links, many of which are spammy and irrelevant. It looks like a link package was bought at some point. The other two have a similar number of links but www.cornhole-game.org/cornhole-bags.html has more anchor text themed links. None of which seem to be overly optimized. http://www.samscornholebags.com/ seems to have a lot of company branded anchor text links compared to keyword links. http://www.ajjcornhole.com/cornhole-bags.php as I said obviously bought links and has a ton of stuffed keyword links on poor sites http://www.ajjcornhole.com/cornhole-bags.php has minimal social shares http://www.cornhole-game.org/cornhole-bags.html has about 30 shares http://www.samscornholebags.com/ has about 30 shares but a good number of likes and some other social signals. All 3 sites have an A grade using the on page grade tool here on this site. All 3 got dinged for keyword stuffing. http://www.samscornholebags.com/ ranks the highest with the least amount of links and PA http://www.ajjcornhole.com/cornhole-bags.php ranks next with a really poor link profile and the least amount of social activity http://www.cornhole-game.org/cornhole-bags.html ranks the lowest with anchor text links that are not spammed and some social activity So with all of this in mind, would anybody care to weigh in on why they think any of these sites are ranking where they are in comparison to one another.
Competitive Research | | Atomicx0 -
SERP rankings consistency
I have a website which is showing different serp rankings. On one computer, he's on the first page, on another, he's second page and another person from outside our office sees him ranked differently. What would account for the inconsistency in rankings?
Competitive Research | | priceseo0 -
Ranking and Domain/Page Authority
I'm not seeing a very good correlation between ranking and domain/page authority. Am I missing something here? ie., 2nd raning at 1/0. Also seeing competitor as "12" domain authority in "competitive domain analysis", but shows much higher here for same competitor? <colgroup><col width="94"> <col width="171"> <col width="108"></colgroup>
Competitive Research | | delphia
| Page Authority | Page Linking Root Domains | Domain Authority |
| 70 | 40 | 83 |
| 1 | 0 | 41 |
| 51 | 3 | 97 |
| 34 | 5 | 36 |
| 41 | 3 | 52 |
| 23 | 1 | 59 |
| 59 | 49 | 100 |
| 48 | 2 | 100 |
| 52 | 6 | 77 |
| 27 | 2 | 14 |
| 1 | 0 | 57 |
| 15 | 1 | 36 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 24 | 1 | 57 |
| 28 | 2 | 36 |
| 21 | 1 | 36 |1 -
Any Tool for Tracking Domain / Page Authority Growth?
Is there any tool available in the market where there is a ranking list of fastest growth in Domain and Page Authority? I launched a job site 8 months ago and I am curious to see what % of websites (not just job specific) have experienced faster growth in a similar time frame in Domain and Page Authority to get a sense of what may have been accomplished. thank you very much,
Competitive Research | | knielsen0 -
How come the results in Google vary with domains
Hello, How is everyone doing? My question is about the google search engine results page. How come some results have the www. in front of them and some don't. Also what are the SEO implications of having www. in front of your search results vs. not. Is this something to do with canonical? I have included a screen shot so you will see what I mean. One result is www.gearyi.com and the result without the www is ingenexdigital.com. R6GLL.png
Competitive Research | | digitalops0