2 Duplicate E-commerce sites Risk vs Reward
-
Hi guys
I have a duplicate content question I was hoping someone might be able to give me some advice on?
I work for a small company in the UK and in our niche we have a huge product range and an excellent website providing the customer with a very good experience. We’re also backed up by a bespoke warehouse/logistic management system further enhancing the quality of our product. We get most traffic through PPC and are not one of the biggest brands in the industry and have to fight for marketshare.
Recently we were approached by another company in our industry that have built up a huge and engaged audience over decades but can’t logistically tap into their following to sell the products so they have suggested a partnership. They are huge fans of what we do and basically want a copy of our site to be rebranded and hosted on a subdomain of their website and we would then pay them a commission of all the sales the new site received. So 2 identical sites with different branding would exist.
Based on tests they have carried out we could potentially double our sales in weeks and the potential is huge so we are excited about the possibility.
But…..how would we handle the duplicate content, would we be penalised? Would just one of the sites be penalised? Or if sales increase as much as we think they might, would it be worth a penalty as our current rankings aren’t great?
Any advice would be great.
Cheers
Richard
-
Thats great advice, i'll be sure to put it to good use!
And thanks for the Yahoo analogy, i'll keep it in mind!
-
Thanks Rich for the insight, it helps in understanding where you are coming from. My only other point would be that if you do go through with this partnership, there should be some other way to build your brand with all the customers coming through the site you are going to build/maintain. Your contract should make clear that you are allowed to have access to all customer data and can use it for marketing etc from your main product site (not the one you are managing). Your partner should not only promote this new site, but your branded products and main site as well. Leverage this situation to gain awareness of your product so that you can build organic traffic to your site. Set your business plan so that at the end of the contract you have used this relationship to make your reach "huge". Therefore, if at the end of the contract your revenue goes to zero from this project it does not matter. Don't assume that your partner would never start their own e-commerce operation. Once they watch you guys take the lion's share of the revenue, they can do the math really quick to realize that they can afford to build something, pay for it and make even more money.
There was once this massive web portal that ruled the internet called "Yahoo" way back in the last century. Yahoo decided to let this little startup that was founded by a couple of goofy college kids to show branded web search results on the Yahoo website. As Yahoo was the biggest site on the internet at the time, lots of people learned about this really great little search engine called "Google" (you may have heard of it). So many people liked the search results from Google that even after Yahoo stopped using Google for search results, it did not matter as the users were already going to Google directly.
-
Thanks very much for your responses I really appreciate them.
CleverPhd - we wouldn’t be giving total control of the domain away as we would design it, maintain it and add and remove products when we see fit. But I totally agree with you about them gaining a higher volume of organic and direct traffic and potentially doing what they want with it.
If they did decide not to sell our products it would mean ending the contract we have after an allotted time frame and either finding a new partner to design a new website and entering in a similar deal with them or start their own e-commerce operation which logistically is a huge undertaking, its taken us 15 years to build up relationships and offer the amount of products we sell so it’s not a viable option (at the minute anyway).
From the initial meeting they did stress that they didn’t want to run their online shop themselves and were happy to take a commission. They also gave a firm commitment to push the site through various media channels and their reach is huge. You said we would be at a disadvantage if the set up works out good or bad but either way we would be gaining more sales, just not increasing our brand reach through that channel. So in essence wouldn’t you just see it as separate revenue stream we could live without even if it fell apart?
Dimitri – Thanks, it looks like if we go ahead I’ll be insisting on canonical tags!
Don – Cheers for the alternatives and the offer to PM you.
I really appreciate the insight guys!
Rich
-
Hello Rich,
I think giving them a copy of you domain would be a very bad choice. They will likely have the duplicate content problems as I am sure Google would "most likely" recognize you as the source of the content. Since you were around first. Basically, to Google, the site would be relegated to a low quality clone of yours and they would never see respectable SERP results. Ultimately not really helping either of you.
I am of the opinion there is an alternative solution out there, some off the top of my head....
- First, a referral program makes complete sense here, this is exactly the kind of situations in which referral programs were designed for.
- Second, let them build their own website with your products, provide support in the process but be careful to ensure they are in fact building their own site with their own branding and content. If they want your product descriptions make it clear that they must be accompanied by their own description ie (Manufacture Description | Our Description). Let the site evolve on its own, user reviews, testimonials, user images.. ect.
- Third, give them an incentive program. If they want to partner with you and it is beneficial then make it work for both of you. The exact details would need your input. My thinking is to offer their community an exclusive offer (5%-10%) off their first purchase of $X or more. Then pay your partner $X amount for each discount claimed, + X% of the next non-discounted sale. Obviously you would need to cross check that they are in fact a user of your partner's community which would involve some data exchange. You don't want people just posting the discount on the internet for anybody to use.
The actual solution I would recommend would require more information from both sides of the situation, The good thing here is you are in the power seat and nothing really can get done with out your say-so. I would recommend caution with giving anybody direct access to your content, if somebody wants it that means you are doing something right.
I hope this input helps you. I have had personal experience with duplicating a retail website for business to business sales. If you would like more thoughts feel free to PM me.
Don
-
Hi there.
Duplicate content = problems. That's for sure. If website does get penalized, it would be the website, which will be considered scraper by Google. In your case (if your current website is indexed, ranking and don't have any penalties) it would be your partners. So, in theory you can bring a penalization to your partner
Or if sales increase as much as we think they might, would it be worth a penalty as our current rankings aren’t great?
Penalty is never good. It might seem ok in the beginning, but when you get hit, you gonna get screwed.
Now, my suggestion would be to go with partnership and give them a "copy" of your website, but put canonical links to every single page, linking back to your original one. Then it'll be win-win combination. Just make sure it's one of required and clear conditions to your partner.
Cheers.
-
The duplicate content issue could be as simple as having them setup canonical links from their site to the same pages on your site so that Google would see where they originated from on your site.
I would not be concerned as much about the SEO implications, what about your business implications? If the other site can sell all your products and controls the domain they are on, what happens when this other site now has all this great organic and direct traffic and decides to NOT to sell your products? They can just take that subdomain traffic and direct folks to wherever and whatever product they want.
I am sure there are other reasons that you cannot mention here on why you all are considering this, but at face value, this agreement makes no sense to me. If your product is so great and the other site has a great audience, they should just buy the product from you and sell it like any other wholesale type vendor relationship.
It sounds like they do not want to take the risk and would rather have your company take the risk. Then, if this all works out ok, they have all the leverage to control the traffic. You are at a disadvantage if this setup works out good or bad.
Good luck!
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
-
Having problem with multiple ccTLD sites, SERP showing different sites on different region
Hi everyone, We have more than 20 websites for different region and all the sites have their specific ccTLD. The thing is we are having conflict in SERP for our English sites and almost all the English sites have the same content I would say 70% of the content is duplicating. Despite having a proper hreflang, I see co.uk results in (Google US) and not only .co.uk but also other sites are showing up (xyz.in, xyz.ie, xyz.com.au)The tags I'm using are below, if the site is for the US I'm using canonical and hreflang tag :https://www.xyz.us/" />https://www.xyz.us/" hreflang="en-us" />and for the UK siteshttps://www.xyz.co.uk/" />https://www.xyz.co.uk/" hreflang="en-gb" />I know we have ccTLD so we don't have to use hreflang but since we have duplicate content so just to be safe we added hreflang and what I have heard/read that there is no harm if you have hreflang (of course If implemented properly).Am I doing something wrong here? Or is it conflicting due to canonicals for the same content on different regions and we are confusing Google so (Google showing the most authoritative and relevant results)Really need help with this.Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shahryar890 -
Duplicate Content That Isn't Duplicated
In Moz, I am receiving multiple messages saying that there is duplicate page content on my website. For example, these pages are being highlighted as duplicated: https://www.ohpopsi.com/photo-wallpaper/made-to-measure/pop-art-graffiti/farm-with-barn-and-animals-wall-mural-3824 and https://www.ohpopsi.com/photo-wallpaper/made-to-measure/animals-wildlife/little-elephants-garden-seamless-pattern-wall-mural-3614. As you can see, both pages are different products, therefore I can't apply a 301 redirect or canonical tag. What do you suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | e3creative0 -
Curious what risk we are for Panda 4.2 update
We are curious to know what the MOZ community thinks about our level of unique content on the following profile and if the community thinks we are currently at risk / susceptible for a Panda 4.2 Penalty. We have profiles on over 4,000 colleges (https://www.noodle.com/colleges/coUD/williams-college) some are more populated with content than others. We've already taken action to noindex several hundred thousand profile URLs (https://www.noodle.com/tutoring/tc2d9be/eye-level-center-of-tribeca) which currently publish less original content. Curious how other major vertical search websites approach this problem (a la Glassdoor, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc) As always - the feedback from this community is priceless!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abargmann0 -
Duplicate Content www vs. non-www and best practices
I have a customer who had prior help on his website and I noticed a 301 redirect in his .htaccess Rule for duplicate content removal : www.domain.com vs domain.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnvoyWeb
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com/$1 [R=301,L,NC] The result of this rule is that i type MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com in the browser and it redirects to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com I wonder if this is causing issues in SERPS. If I have some inbound links pointing to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some pointing to MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, I would think that this rewrite isn't necessary as it would seem that Googlebot is smart enough to know that these aren't two sites. -----Can you comment on whether this is a best practice for all domains?
-----I've run a report for backlinks. If my thought is true that there are some pointing to www.www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some to the www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, is there any value in addressing this?0 -
E- commerce websites - Best method for earning links ?
Hello everyone, Lots of my clients are e-commerce websites and I would like to know if some of you would like to share a good method to earn backlinks so I can share with them all some sort of roadmap. Thank you Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amadeus_eBC0 -
E Commerce product page canonical and indexing + URL parameters
Hi, I'm having some issues on the best way to handle site structure. The technical side of SEO isn't my strong point so I thought I'd ask the question before I make the decision. Two examples for you to look at. This is a new site http://www.tester.co.uk/electrical/multimeters/digital. By selecting another page to see more products you get this url string where/p/2. This page also has the canonical tag relating to this page and not the original page. Now if say for example I exclude this parameter (where) in webmaster tools will I be stopping Google indexing the products on the other pages where/p/2, 3, 4 etc. and the same if I make the canonical point to multimeters/digital/ instead of multimeters/digital/where/p/2 etc.? I have the same question applied to the older site http://www.pat-services.co.uk/digital-multimeters-26.html. which no longer has an canonical tags at all. The only real difference is Google is indexing http://www.pat-services.co.uk/digital-multimeters-26.html?page=2 but not http://www.tester.co.uk/electrical/multimeters/digital/where/p/2 Thanks for help in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PASSLtd0 -
Is my site being penalized?
I launched http://rumma.ge in February of this year. Because I'm using a domain hack (the Georgian domain), I'd really like to rank for just the word "rummage". After launching, I was steady at around page 4/5 on searches for "rummage". However since then I've tumbled out of the first 100. In fact I can't even find the site in the first 20 pages on Google for that search. Even a search for my exact homepage title text doesn't bring up the site, despite the fact that the site is still in the index. I'm wondering if one of the following could be the root cause: We have a ccTLD (.ge)--not sure about the impacts of this, but seems like it might not be the root cause because we were ranking for "rummage" when we first launched. Tried running an Adwords campaign but the site was flagged as a "bridge page" (working on getting this addressed). I'm wondering if this could have carryover impacts into natural search rankings? We've tried doing some press and built up a decent number of backlinks over the past couple of months, many of which had "rummage" in the anchor text. This was all organic, but happened over the span of a month which may be too fast? Am I being penalized? Beyond checking indexing of the site, is there a way to tell if I've been flagged for some bad behavior? Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I'm really confused by this since I feel like I've been doing things right and my rankings have been travelling downward. Thanks!! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | minouye0 -
A Site in Flash to Optimize
Hello, I have to understand if this site www.spacemilanmodels.com.pt can be optimize since the entire website is in flash wich is not good for optimizacion. What do you guys suggest? Recommendations? Is it possible only with link-building? Tks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0