Wordpress themes causing google penalty(need experts to settle a debate)
-
Hi, I have been having a disagreement with another online marketing company. We are both promoting the same product under a different brand name but we ended up using the same theme to build our WordPress sites off of but in no way is the content the same.
They are telling me that using the same theme in the same industry will cause a Google penalty. I do not believe this and do not see this causing a problem. The sites are relatively new so there is no proof of traffic dropping or penalties as of yet.
What is everyone's professional opinion on this? Can a WordPress theme cause duplicate content penalty? If so would that not mean that anyone using themes will have some sort of penalty?
-
HI thanks for the response,
This is exactly what I thought I am not sure why they are so confident that this will cause a penalty. The structure of the sites are definitely different a no links have been made between them as they are essentially two site competing in the same market under different brands.
I am going to send them this thread so I can finally end this ongoing debate. Its a waste of my time.
Thanks again.
-
The theme generally doesn't matter at all. As long as the content is unique on your site, then there's no problem whatsoever. Like previously mentioned, there are plenty of people using the same WordPress theme, and it's the content that's unique, not the theme.
-
Thank you Jane
This is what I was thinking...
..."or they're trying to scare the competition into spending time and money on something that doesn't matter."
-Andy
-
It's a pretty straight forward 'no' Tyson. If all that is used that is the same is the theme, there is no penalty to be handed out here.
If they are concerned about it, tell them to change their theme, but you don't need to worry about this at all
-Andy
-
I think that if you have completely different content this should not be an issue.
You should also notice you guys are not
- using the same phone / visible email address
- linking between each other (tough its only 2 sites)
- have the exact same structure
My other recommendation is that one of you change the structure (not the theme)... each theme - or at least the good ones allow you to create a different structure, different widgets, different icons and similar structure related items.
For example you can use additional tabs in your homepage, use different widgets in your footer and so fourth.
Keep in mind that many people buy the same theme and in a world where themes are content related in many cases meaning real-estate themes, transportation themes and so on it not logical that Google would rate a site just based on the theme.
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
-
Wordpress: Pages vs Posts vs Portfolio
Hi All, I'm looking to put pen to paper and design my main structual template for my website. I will be creating the new site in Wordpress. My understanding of Wordpress is broken into the Static Pages, Posts and Portfolio. Static PAGE
Web Design | | Mark_Ch
Static one off content.
No tags, categories or archived Posts
content entries, which is listed in reverse chronological order.
Update post entry to maintain overall freshness of your website.
tags, categories & archived Portfolio
????? Question What are the benefits of a portfolio page over Static Pages & Posts When creating feature rich articles should i use static pages, posts or portfolio. Thanks Mark0 -
Creating Multiple Sub-Directories in Wordpress
Hi fellow Mozzers, I'm currently in the process of planning/building a website for e-commerce and have stumbled on a bit of a hurdle with sub-directories. I want to use a piece of software called SellerDeck to generate my e-commerce store and also my homepage (index.html). This element of the build is fine as the e-commerce store will sit in a sub-directory of .co.uk/store/. What I'm struggling with is the rest of the site architecture. I want to use Wordpress to manage content for the rest of the site. I want to have sub-directories .co.uk/help/ and .co.uk/blog/, all managed from one Wordpress installation. Is this possible? If not, does having two separate installations of Wordpress create any speed issues? Additional question for bonus points from me; lets say I wanted to do away with sub-directories for the /help/ and /blog/ elements (but keep the /store/), could I have a Wordpress installation that doesn't generate a homepage (index.php) so I can utilise the e-commerce software version instead. Essentially I'd be installing Wordpress at the root folder, but wouldn't have an index.php made by Wordpress. Many thanks in advance
Web Design | | BlueTree_Sean0 -
Does anyone know if the YOAST SEO plugin works 100% on a responsive wordpress template?
Hi, Does anyone know if the YOAST SEO plugin works 100% on responsive wordpress template? In other words, when you configure the custom title and metadescription is it also configured for the tablet and cellphone views as well? Thanks Carla
Web Design | | Carla_Dawson0 -
New more "helpful" internal linking causing SERP & traffic drop?
Still dealing with the weird traffic drop on my website. I have removed a bunch of old links from a defunct blog, 301 thin pages, added text to remaining pages. I'm still stumped. So awhile ago I freshened up my website and thought I was "helping people" by making sure they could CONTACT the studio more easily... I added more links to the "contact page" I thought this would help conversions...This changed the number of links to my entire site....Would this be the problem with my ranking/traffic drop? http://bayareaboudoir.com/babinternal1.pdf
Web Design | | Squee1 -
Deciding which Wordpress Platform
Hey Guys, I am trying to choose which is the best platform to use to build my website. I have had a look at the following: studiopress thesis headway woothemes I've just spent a month building a website using the WIX platform only to find out that it's not SEO friendly, so before I start a new site, I just want to make sure I choose the BEST SEO FRIENDLY theme. If someone could please assist that would be greatly appreciated. Also, I already have paid for theme subscriptions to the following sites (before I joined SEOMOZ) are the following SEO friendly? https://www.elegantthemes.com/ http://www.templatemonster.com/ http://www.templatesold.com/ Thanks so much in advance
Web Design | | Giorgio680 -
What are some of the best website hosting platforms for Wordpress?
I'm looking for a new hosting provider and have been told to find one that specializes in Wordpress hosting because of higher page speed load times, etc.. Can anyone recommend a couple of Wordpress Hosting providers
Web Design | | webestate0 -
Need an SEO pro to build us a new fine art website
Hey Seomoz friends My friends and I started buying and selling art 5 years ago. We did it all on ebay. Two years ago I decided to try an attempt at building us a website to further our business outside of ebay. www.originalartbroker.com I used homestead.com software aka intuit to do this. I was able to get a lot of first page results in seo after a ton of work and willing to do a lot more. I'm sure the homestead site slowed my efforts down. I need more power 🙂 What we do. We sell fine art. We are trying to aspire to the leading seller of fine contemporary art online. We will do whatever it takes to get there. Our issue is not our product. Our issue is getting traffic to the site. I only have 175-200 visitors a day. I need better results for the keywords of our artists and inquires that surround them. We have a bounce rate of 70%, average time on site of 1 minute 50 seconds, and a slow loading site that is almost impossible to create individual pages for pieces (mgmt nightmare) Outside of our site we have blogs, squidoo pages, facebook account with 2500 fans, twitter page with 2k followers, youtube channel, and a blog on the site for new arrivals. We have a 200-250 piece on our site at any given time. We add probably ten pieces on average a week. We don't need any kind of ecommerce management software as most of our sales are done over the phone being that it is higher end art. I need a site that out performs my competition. I need to be in the top three when someone types in "leroy neiman" "peter max" and so on. I, with limited knowledge, need to be able to use the software everyday to upload new art as it comes in. I want every piece to have its own page so that I can also add pieces to a google merchant account. When I add new pieces under a certain artists and it creates its own page i want it to create h tags and an url extension for each product as I add them based off the discription and artists name. I would like some sort of blog integration to post our new arrivals as we get them. I would like some sort of customer capture. I am thinking something along the lines of them prociding email, name, and zip code to see the prices on the site. You are the seo pro so you know what it takes. I would like to know what a solution would cost to get us on the ground with more seo power. A site with speed that is easily indexed. It doesn't need to have a lot of bells and whistles. Please look at my site and let me know what you think. You can get an idea from that of what we are doing. Please give me an idea of what you can do and what it would cost. Thank you
Web Design | | forecastedinvestments0 -
Why is site not being indexed by Google, and not showing on a crawl test??
On a site we developed of which .com is forwarded to .net domain, we quit getting crawled by google on about the 20th of Feb. Now when we try to run a crawl test on either url, we get There was an error fetching this page. Error description For some reason the page returned did not describe itself as an html page. It could be possible that the url is serving an image, rss feed, pdf, or xml file of some sort. The crawl tool does not currently report metrics on this type of data. Our other sites are fine and this was up to this date. We took out noodp, noydir today as the only thing we could think of. Site is on WP cms.
Web Design | | RobertFisher0