Having 2 domains with same name - Impact on SEO

[Aman_123]

Hi AllAs we still dwindle with the rankings not coming in line with the efforts.I have a question:

We have 2 websites

1. http://www.example.com/ (which lost traffic and rank in Jan 2013). So we assumed that it was due to some penguin penalty. So we worked on disavow extra but nothing actually helped.Though there was no manual penalty mentioned in the GWT. Frustrated with this we thought of having another website 6 months back:

2. https://example.org/ - we did all the right things and by the book. But we are not seeing ranking here too. We did backlink analysis on all competitors and worked on only quality links they had. So all our links are highly highly relevant.  But still the ranks are not moving beyond third page...in fact they moved to 6-7 page in last 2-3 days.

Please suggest ..

1. is it due to same name of domain (our brand name) causing the issue. If yes should we go for 302 or 301 redirect to save ourselves from any penalty that our last website may have got. We can not leave that name unattended as our cataloges etc have that website mentioned. i will expect a scientific reply here not gut feeling please.

2. Is it to do with .org domain extension that it should not be with commercial organizations like us

Kindly reply at the earliest

Regards

Aman

[Aman_123]

Thanks for reply Matt. Agreed these are some links which surely could be out of frustration. Can get them removed. But I have a question, check out our competitors who rank in India. You will be amazed to see their link building. Even one has a sub domain pligg sub domain for all kind of bad links even sex related etc.

However, how can you help us to achieve our goal. You can send a PM too... I will be very glad.

[MattAntonino]

According to Ahrefs you have a 63% of referring pages contain the word "hair."  Your top anchors are hair, loss, transplant, treatment, india

You had 3 links on .edu domains, all of which were spam comments on forums which have now been removed.

Even your latest links are not very clean:

• http://community.macmillan.org.uk/cancer_types/breast-cancer/f/38/p/51392/515703.aspx
• http://origin.wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=114120&p=6418306

Do you think those are natural backlinks passing a lot of value?

[Aman_123]

Thats a very Valid Suggestion...Thanks will surely do it

Also please see if you can to suggest something which is keeping out website from Rank

[TheWebMastercom]

Aman,... well what you are doing is creating thin pages which over time might just risk a Panda Penalty.  You might want to at least no-index those blog pages.

[Aman_123]

That right we could have... but was not ready for a 1% chance so thought this to be best.

Secondly we wanted to show the same copy

[TheWebMastercom]

Why not just use rel canonical?

[Aman_123]

Hi Jonathan

These are just our news coverages posted in other websites. so to avoid content duplicacy we just post images.... apart from news events all categories have text posts

[Aman_123]

Yes!! Matt Definitely it is true for the first website. But now we have a in-house team working on this. That is why are very sure about the links and its relevancy.

But all the websites that are ranking have really bad links but still they rank. One odd keyword of our is on 1st page but main were on 3rd now pushed back to 7th.

Our content sharing is much wider than any one of them. We are simply perplexed why is this all happening to us.

1. We changed even to server in India for new website. That means both websites are on different servers. The new one is in India.

2. New website is secure https://

We know we are just there but there is something we are missing for sure and not able to find that out... it is becoming challenging question for us. Any no of people we ask noone tells us the right solutions

[TheWebMastercom]

Why are your blog pages, just an image of a photocopy of someone elses article.  You realise Google can't read the text from Images for SEO purposes right?

[MattAntonino]

You had an SEO company working for you a few years ago, yes?  They did some REALLY dodgy linking - and yes, you have link issues on the domains.

Unfortunately it looks like both domains have the same issue - you've bought links or had an SEO company do work in the past. Either way you need a disavow, site cleanup & new authority built to the site.  The new site is really good looking.  Good luck with it!  Let me know if you need anything further.

[Aman_123]

Thanks Matt for the reply,

As We didn't receive any manual penalty in GWT whether it is Panda or Penguin,  that caused us drop our ranking of .com site. But after that we studied thoroughly by ourselves a lot in order to know first whole about SEO, all Google updates, guidelines , and best practices etc. And revamped our old .com website from scratch; whether it is about new site structure, best UX from users point of view, unique content, internal linking, meta tags, curating high in-depth researched article or blog posts, building quality & high relevant links etc 
We also found many many suspicious backlinks as well here and thought to cleanup that as well may be the reason behind.

Yes, with keeping above all best SEO practices in mind to formed another new website https://example.org/ . BUT still we are facing STRANGE behavior to our website by Google, & not considered us to beat our competitors. We worked enough hard & done backlink profile analysis of our competitors and found many bad activities by them, still ranking in good position in SERPs than us.

[Alick300]

Hi,

If you are using the same content on both website then that could be the major issue but If you are not using the same content then your site ranking is not down due to exact domain name with different extension.

Second, to clear up something "Google has no way of knowing that your domain is a 'new version' of the old one, unless you tell it. The method for this is a 301 redirect but as you are saying that your site's ranking went down due to algorithm update so there is no point to redirect old website to new.

You can do one thing put a splash page on old website like

"Old website has moved to new website

New website formally old website

& provide a 'click here' link to reach new website (*** No 301 redirect in your case**)

Thanks

[MattAntonino]

Whenever you don't give us a specific domain to help on, you have to give as much info as possible.  On the .com, after you disavowed did you build new authority or just assume the disavow would be enough? (It's not.)  On the .com you said you lost traffic January 2013 which is Panda, not Penguin.  So you were probably doing a whole lot of link cleanup to solve a problem you can't solve with link cleanup.

Given the other domain isn't ranking either, I'd guess you have some sort of Panda (content) issue. Duplicate content, repetitious & spammy titles, huge keyword stuffed meta keywords tags, thin or non-existent content, etc.  Without seeing the site itself it's hard to say but this all reeks of Panda.

As to the questions:

1. No, it's not the domain name being similar.  Without knowing the domains hard to say about 301.

2. Definitely not.