Need help understanding "Clone sites"
-
I just read an article about Panda and it warned against against Clone sites:
"Clone sites are a strong panda factor (JM, Mar 10, 2014)"
I don't have any clone sites, but there are dozens of sites with imitations of mine. We were the first in the area of interest, and then all these other sites that imitated us popped up. None are exact replicas. But many have spun some of our articles and used them to create their sites; the site structures are not identical though.
Google seems to know we are the original site on the topic since we are ranked #1 for most terms.
Would these be considered clone sites in their eyes?
-
And do you think that Google always knows who the original site is? Do they always check history?
On top of more aged content, we are the only one with tens of thousands of FB Likes (wish they were G+, but our users do not use that), and thousands of comments. All real.
-
Usually in the design industry clone sites means a website that copies the functionality of some other website, some changes on the design and boom! When it comes to Panda update I believe this has more to do with content.
So if there are websites A and B in the same industry and B have spun most of the content that is available on site A and put it on his website, probably B is the site Panda love to eat.
Hope this gives you a clue!!
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
-
Disallowed "Search" results with robots.txt and Sessions dropped
Hi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin
I've started working on our website and I've found millions of "Search" URL's which I don't think should be getting crawled & indexed (e.g. .../search/?q=brown&prefn1=brand&prefv1=C.P. COMPANY|AERIN|NIKE|Vintage Playing Cards|BIALETTI|EMMA PAKE|QUILTS OF DENMARK|JOHN ATKINSON|STANCE|ISABEL MARANT ÉTOILE|AMIRI|CLOON KEEN|SAMSONITE|MCQ|DANSE LENTE|GAYNOR|EZCARAY|ARGOSY|BIANCA|CRAFTHOUSE|ETON). I tried to disallow them on the Robots.txt file, but our Sessions dropped about 10% and our Average Position on Search Console dropped 4-5 positions over 1 week. Looks like over 50 Million URL's have been blocked, and all of them look like all of them are like the example above and aren't getting any traffic to the site. I've allowed them again, and we're starting to recover. We've been fixing problems with getting the site crawled properly (Sitemaps weren't added correctly, products blocked from spiders on Categories pages, canonical pages being blocked from Crawlers in robots.txt) and I'm thinking Google were doing us a favour and using these pages to crawl the product pages as it was the best/only way of accessing them. Should I be blocking these "Search" URL's, or is there a better way about going about it??? I can't see any value from these pages except Google using them to crawl the site.0 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Need opinion to split the site for speed up the SEO process
We have two versions of our website English and Arabic. Arabic is in a sub-directory www.oncarx.com/ar (Not a Sub Domain). When we started SEO, we found that most of our Articles are plagiarized and contain non-original content. We are almost done with the optimization of our Arabic articles. English site contains too many articles and are not optimized for SEO. For getting good results and speed up the process, which of the following idea is better? We should separate the English and Arabic sites. We should remove most of the articles from English site. If there is any other good option, please let us know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sagha0 -
Difference in Number of URLS in "Crawl, Sitemaps" & "Index Status" in Webmaster Tools, NORMAL?
Greetings MOZ Community: Webmaster Tools under "Index Status" shows 850 URLs indexed for our website (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). The number of URLs indexed jumped by around 175 around June 10th, shortly after we launched a new version of our website. No new URLs were added to the site upgrade. Under Webmaster Tools under "Crawl, Site maps", it shows 637 pages submitted and 599 indexed. Prior to June 6th there was not a significant difference in the number of pages shown between the "Index Status" and "Crawl. Site Maps". Now there is a differential of 175. The 850 URLs in "Index Status" is equal to the number of URLs in the MOZ domain crawl report I ran yesterday. Since this differential developed, ranking has declined sharply. Perhaps I am hit by the new version of Panda, but Google indexing junk pages (if that is in fact happening) could have something to do with it. Is this differential between the number of URLs shown in "Index Status" and "Crawl, Sitemaps" normal? I am attaching Images of the two screens from Webmaster Tools as well as the MOZ crawl to illustrate what has occurred. My developer seems stumped by this. He has submitted a removal request for the 175 URLs to Google, but they remain in the index. Any suggestions? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Does my website have an Exact Match Domain or a "brand"?
I'd like to get some input from the Moz community about the domain name I use on a travel website I run as a hobby. I got heavily whacked by an update in September 2012 which some have said was because my site is an EMD. Others said it was because I had poor quality backlinks (but in fact I hardly had any). With the benefit of hindsight, I'd love to know what really happened. The website is www.traveltipsthailand.com (now www.asiantraveltips.com) and the "brand" I use is "Travel Tips Thailand.The traffic penalty I incurred was around 80% and despite a LOT of work overhauling the site and trying to build some better quality links, I don't believe it has really recovered much. It ranks for non-competitive, low-traffic key phrases (which means it's not penalised as such), but struggles to rank anywhere meaningful on any phrase likely to drive traffic to the site. At this stage I really just want to know whether to persist with the site (it's heartbreaking, to be honest) or drop it an build something new from scratch. I monitor the site's progress using Moz Pro, so I can see all the search ranking, authority and backlink data. 5254ab15dcaa91-52423790
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Is this the "Google Dance"?
We just did a site redesign, and removed the noindex, etc. about 10 days ago. Over the last 24 hours, I've gotten some of my top keywords on the first page, but now they are gone, a few hours later. I assume this is typical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Please help on this penalized site!
OK, this is slowly frying my brain and would like some clarification from someone in the know, we have posted multiple reconsideration requests the regular "site violates googles quality guidelines" .."look for unnatural links etc" email back in March 2012, I came aboard the business in August 2012 to overcome bad SEO companies work. So far i have filled several disavow requests by domain and cleared over 90% of our backlink profile which where all directory, multiple forum spam links etc from WMT, OSE and Ahrefs and compiled this to the disavow tool, as well as sending a google docs shared file in our reconsideration request of all the links we have been able to remove and the disavow tool, since most where built in 2009/2010 a lot where impossible to remove. We managed to shift about 12 - 15% of our backlink profile by working very very hard too remove them. The only links that where left where quality links and forum posts created by genuine users and relevant non spam links As well as this we now have a high quality link profile which has also counteracted a lot of the bad "seo" work done by these previous companies, i have explained this fully in our reconsideration request as well as a massive apology on behalf of the work those companies did, and we are STILL getting generic "site violates" messages, so far we have spent in excess of 150 hours to get this penalty removed and so far Google hasn't even batted an eyelid. We have worked SO hard to combat this issue it almost feels almost very personal, if Google read the reconsideration request they would see how much work we have done too remove this issue. If anyone can give any updates or help on anything we have missed i would appreciate it, i feel like we have covered every base!! Chris www.palicomp.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | palicomp0 -
Using "Read More" buttons as a tool to cram in Content
Hi Mozzers! Let's say our website is clean, professional, and minimalistic. Can we use a "read more" button that will expand the text on the page to increase the amount of content while (unless clicked) not impacting the appearance? I want to make sure I am not violating Google Webmaster's guidelines for "Hidden Text" Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0