Competitor Ranking High has 2 Domains, But Duplicate Website ?

[hfranz]

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?

[CodyWheeler]

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.

[RyanKent]

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.

[EGOL]

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.

[Marcus_Miller]

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

[hfranz]

Whoops. Actually they both appear in google that way but the cached domain is there main domain. Does that mean that it is parked?

[hfranz]

Wait! But when I do  site:example.com/ in google . both websites are still being picked up.

[hfranz]

I would rather not. Private email possibly.

[hfranz]

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.

[sferrino]

Can you provide the sites? It's pretty hard to tell without looking at them.

[EGOL]

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.