Duplicate site with same content
-
Hi All,
I hope someone can assist, We have 2 brands that sell the exact same products. We have a main and an off brand. We just redeveloped the main brands site and now have to do the off brand (was owned by another company and we acquired them, we then changed their products to match ours).
Am I able to pretty much clone the site and just change the branding and rel canonical each page to its original on the main brand? Granted I will lose rankings but will it be something that will affect anything else?
I want to do this so it saves us time in updating products on both sites (and avoids errors in incorrect pricing).
Would appreciate some guidance with this one
Cheers
Dave
-
Thanks Gents,
Great answers - much appreciated
-
Hi David,
You will lose indexation for the non-canonical URLs, so keep that in mind. If you don't get much organic traffic to the off-brand, than that's probably not a problem.
If that is the case though, I'm wondering why even build out a site for the off-brand?
-
Hi Dave,
You are right to look at cross-domain canonical to resolve this. This is absolutely what it is intended for. Google gives you more guidance on how to ensure this is done correctly, here.
Will it affect anything else? Well, it shouldn't, but a little due diligence after the work has been completed will help confirm all is OK. An audit of the two sites will help you to see that everything is mapped correctly.
-Andy
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
-
Keyword rich domain names -> Point to sales funnel sites or to landing pages on primary domain?
Hey everyone,
Local SEO | | Transpera
We have a tonne of old domains we have done nothing with. All of them are keyword-rich domains.
Things like "[City]SEOPro" or "[City]DigitalMarketing" where [city] is a city that we are already targeting services in. So all of these domains will be targeted for local cities as keywords. We have been having an internal debate about whether or not we should just host sales funnel pages on these domains, that are rich in keywords and content......... ... Or ... ... Should we point these domains to landing pages on our existing domain that are basically the same as what we would do with the sales funnel pages, but are on our primary site? (keyword rich, with good and plentiful content) Then, as a follow-up question... Should these be set as just 301 redirects on these domains to our actual primary domain so the browser sees the landing page domain instead of the actual keyword-rich domain? ( [city]seopro.com ) Thanks guys. I know for some, the response will be an obvious one. However; we have probably way over thought this and have arguments for almost every scenario. We think we have an answer but wanted to send this out to the community first. I won't post what we are thinking yet, so that the answers can remain unbiased for now and we can have a conversation without it being swayed any one way. We understand that 301 redirects would be seen as a doorway page.
We are also only discussing in the context of organic search only.
If we ran the domains as their own sites, they would be about 3 pages of content only. Pretty static, but good content. Think of a PAS style sales funnel. Problem -> Acknowledgement -> Solution.0 -
My 12 year old site suddenly has all of its landing pages deindexed?
Half of my landing pages have suddenly been de-indexed without warning. These have been ranking for over two years! Climbing from the bottom of page two to the top three of page one with fundamental content marketing and healthy real links. I'm desperately trying to figure out what has gone wrong. They even deindexed my Medford Oregon landing page, then reinstated in and I asked to be re-indexed on search console and deindexed it again. I've checked screaming frog, and I see no robot issues. There were some wp-media attachments with kind of similar URLs (city name-locksmith) ranking on page four that I found (i thought I set Yoast to redirect all attachment, strange) and I deleted those because I thought that might be the problem. But they have deindexed even more today! We are a 12 year old company and our livelihood was built on search, which is why we have maintained good ethics (which most locksmiths don't care about) and have done our best to play by Google's rules. I checked with wp-engine and everything seems to be perfect for our hosting. Any suggestions would be so greatly appreciated.
Local SEO | | Meier0 -
Will I get Penelized for having a .co.uk site AND a .com site?
Hi Mozers, I have a very important pitch coming up which needs to tackle a questions about international SEO. My client currently has a .com website, but we are debating internally about creating a .co.uk website too so that we can localise content for the UK versus American English on our .com site. Currently, our clients proposition is global, so we made the decision to create a .com website but using American English spelling as a large chunk of English speakers in the world use American English over British English. However, we want to grow the business within the UK, and therefore want to use British English language. Hence creating a .co.uk website. Now, my question is this.... the new .co.uk website will be identical content as the .com website, except for a few spelling changes and the way we phrase certain sentences. How would we be able to run both a .co.uk site and .com site without being penelized from Google for plagarism? Would it involve href lang tags? Server hosting location? Any ideas from you guys out there?
Local SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Category pages are treated as duplicate content - is that a problem?
Hi there I have analyzing a webshop where we sell products for pets, gardening and the like. I am getting a lot of "Duplicate Content" alerts from Moz when doing a site crawl and I am told that the pages for e.g. cat products and gardening tools show duplicate content. Those two pages contain no identical products, so I am guessing that it is just the "set up" of the page (they look almost identical, except for the products). My question is: Is this really a problem? Does it affect my ranking in a negative way, and if so, how can I counter it? Best regards Frederik
Local SEO | | fhertzp0 -
Linkbuilding for Medical-Industry Sites
Hey Mozzers, I currently have a client in the medical industry who I'm trying to build some keyword rankings for, but I'm having a hard-time finding low-/no- cost link partners. The client specializes in 'breast augmentation procedures' (ex. breast reduction, breast enhancement, reconstruction, etc.), however, a lot of the sites I've been finding throughout my link prospecting efforts are either low-quality or haven't published content in at least several years. My question to you all is: Have you found any SEO strategies to be particularly successful for medical industry-based sites or plastic surgeon sites? Thank you all so much for taking the time to read this! I'm looking forward to reading your responses!
Local SEO | | maxcarnage0 -
What is the best sites for Press Release
I am looking at all the various press release sites out there. I have a local business relocating and we want to use a press release to get the information out there and hopefully get the move picked up by a local newspaper. Any experience/suggestions on best PR sites?
Local SEO | | bricegump0 -
Developing a content marketing strategy for a social security disability firm.
I have a client that I've been working with for a little over a year now and I've been struggling to generate new business from his online presence. Initially, I completely re-designed his website with semantically correct html markup, and used all of typical, site level SEO tactics, i.e., keywords in title tags, h tags, paragraphs, correct NAP, etc. We've only seen very low marginal returns off of our efforts. Part of the problem is that my client is not an attorney, but instead he runs a social security disability advocacy firm. He still performs all of the operations that an attorney performs, but due to the fact that he is not an attorney, we cannot optimize his site for search phrases containing "attorney", which is a common keyword that people would generally use to find the services that my client offers. So I've decided to try a different approach. A content marketing approach. The only reason I prolonged avoided this approach for so long is that, to be frank, I had no idea how to target his ideal clients with content. After talking to my client the other day and recommending this new approach, I uncovered some similarities between his previous clients. Most his clients live in rural areas, and they like nascar, hunting, fishing, etc. So I suggested that I create blog for him, and begin finding some freelance writers that can create some killer content about nascar, hunting and fishing. Admittedly, I don't have a much experience with a content marketing approach, but I want to learn everything there is to know about it. I guess I'm a little unsure about this approach that we're getting ready to try, and would love to hear from some people that have been down this path, and might be able to offer any advice. I really want to help my client's business flourish, and it's now very clear to me that solely relying on an old SEO line of thinking is not doing the trick anymore. Any tips, tactics and strategies would be greatly appreciated. Am I on the right track here? How would we get this content in front of his ideal clients, and market it in such a way that he will get a good return on his investment?
Local SEO | | ScottMcPherson0 -
SEO planning: Franchise/multiple local sites
I am in the planning stages of franchising a cleaning business and was wondering if anyone had some ideas on SEO strategy. If money were no object and I had a team of hundreds of copywriters at my disposal, would the ultimate solution be to have the following sort of URL structure www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city within which there are numerous www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city/local-town pages? If this is the best strategy then is it worthwhile to begin work towards ranking for cities and local towns within them prior to actually operating there? I understand that lack of physical presence will penalize me in terms of local search but would a lack of physical address and phone number render any foundation work pointless (for example, prior to having any franchises in say London, would it be worth while building quality content and links on a www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london page, and then www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london/notting-hill, alongside a blog and so on?) Interested to understand the best way to go about this given the enormity of the campaign! Thanks
Local SEO | | EdwardoUK0