Having 2 brands with the same content - will this work from an SEO perspective
-
Hi All,
I would love if someone could help and provide some insights on this. We're a financial institution and have a set of products that we offer.
We have recently joined with another brand and will now be offering all our products to their customers.
What we are looking to do is have 1 site that masks the content for both sites so it appears as there are 2 seperate brands with different content - in fact we have a main site and then a sister brand that offers the same products.
Is there anyway to do this so when someone searches for Credit Card from Brand A it is indexed under Brand A and same when someone searched for Credit Card from Brand B it is indexed under Brand B.
The one thing is we would not want to rel:can the pages nor be penalised by googles latest PR algorithm.
Hope someone can help!
Thanks
Dave
-
Thanks David, will do!
-
Hi Cindy,
Great Question - I'm not sure what to suggest - probably suggest opening up a new question just to be sure you get eyes on it!
Good Luck!
-
I have a similar question (+ one additional one), and if I need to open a new thread, just let me know.
I have a client with 2 websites - one is a trucking and rigging company that specializes in installation / moving / removal of safes (site #1), the other offers a product line of safes (site #2). I originally designed / implemented site #1 and was able to get "safe installation New York", "safe moving New York", and "safe removal New York" in the top 3 search results in. A little over a year ago, client was approached by another marketing company to create the site #2, who also provided commercial services that I don't. It was a business decision, and we remained in good relations. As a result Site #1 went to the new marketing company and they built Site #2.
Fast forward to about 3 months ago - Site #1 was infected with malware, client wasn't happy with new service, and asked me to take back the Site #1 ( and remove malware), and take Site #2, and re-work the SEO. SEO had dramatically fallen off for Site #1, so I've been working the SEO once I was able to get the malware completely removed and reviewed by Google.
Site #1 had been redesigned by the other marketing company, essentially retaining the content that I created. Site #2 has mostly new content, but under "Services", it references the same services that Site #1 provides, but the content is exactly the same, except that references to the company for Site #1 also link to Site #1. So there is duplicate content for 5 pages on both sites. As it happens, Site #2 that SELLS safes, is ranking #2 for "safe installation new york" for exactly the same content as Site #1 that provides the services. Site #1 ranks >50 for the same keyphrase.
Why would this be? Has Site #2 taken the lead on this keyphrase because of the malware situation and now Site #1 is being penalized for duplicate content?
One other major change on Site #1 is that the web technician used Wordpress's built in page nesting (page is set as child to parent page - nested 3 deep in some cases). What are the consequences (if there are any) of having a page listed as (for example) oztruckingandrigging.com/services/safe/safe-installation vs. oztruckingandrigging.com/safe-installation? The reason I ask this is that when I Moz page optimize for the first one for "safe installation" I get a lower grade then when I Moz page optimize for the second one.
-
The way to think about it is as an opportunity, rather than a cost.
Instead of having two competing brands for the same customer, you now have the opportunity to target two segments of potential customers much more effectively.
Plenty of examples exist of multiple brands under the same umbrella targetting different customer groups. For example in drinks, look at how many brands Coca Cola own - and why they'd buy brands like Innocent to get to a different market group....
In finance, you might want to target one brand at younger consumers who will then grow into the other brand.
Or one for those on a lower budget, for example.
And that will naturally lead to different and unique content. I supply a huge amount of content for businesses, and my structure, language and tone has to be different for each one to appeal to the customers they want.
-
Ah-ha! Ok, that makes sense. Realize it sucks to write unique copy for the same products, but I'm not aware of a better solution for that right now...I'll let you know if I come across anything though! : )
Thanks
-
Thanks B,
I'll suggest this as an option - the reason not to do rel can's is because we want to index organically on Google for both brands..
Cheers
D!
-
Thanks Patrick - it all helps heaps!!!
-
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your awesome reply, We have 2 brands that we have to run (coming from executive team - merger agreement). I'll maybe go back about unique content.
Cheers
-
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the reply. We have 2 brands that we have to run (coming from executive team - merger agreementt). Unfortunately both brands have been aligned to have exactly the same products. There are 2 niches (ie personas) but the products are exactly the same, with the same Product descriptions and same terms and conditions, rates and imagery.
Cheers,
Dave
-
Hi David,
Curious why you're not interested in doing rel=canonicals? I think I understand your overall goal and would suggest simply hiring a content marketer or writer to differentiate the content from product A page to product B page.
Hiring a content marketer or writer to differentiate the content from one to the other would be well worth it in this situation. Have the writer re-organize and re-write the content (while maintaining the same message) so that crawlers will view each page as unique.
Cheers,
B
-
Hi there
I wouldn't do this. What I would do is offer both sets of products under one site with distinctive brand names and markup. That way, your products will appear for their branded searches, with their own pages and rich snippets. I would not "mask" anything or try to trick search engines / users, because that's how you get penalized.
Hopefully I am understanding your question. I would really focus on what Dan Thorton said here...
"If there's no differentiation between the two brands, then there's no point in having them. But if one is targeting a different demographic, then there's a reason to create unique content which will appeal specifically to their audience. The actual product and data may be the same, but the benefit of bespoke content for the right audience will be an increase in conversion rates to actually purchase your services, rather than simply avoiding any SEO penalties..."
You have an opportunity here to have content that's targeted to two different audiences, and increase the overall conversion rate of your website by doing so. I would stick to this route and focus on building great content for each product, pleasing it's target audience.
Let me know if this helps or if you have any questions. Good luck!
Patrick -
Hi,
Duplicate content issues are created when the same content appears on two different urls. So if your content appears on www.yourexample.com/brandaproduct and www.yourexample.com/brandbproduct, then that's when it's an issue.You can do this by changing dynamic elements via personalisation, but it's not necessarily easy to do, and could well end up risking a penalty for masking/cloaking if there's an error.
Personally, I'd rethink why you're running both brands - are they targeting different audiences/locations?
If there's no differentiation between the two brands, then there's no point in having them. But if one is targeting a different demographic, then there's a reason to create unique content which will appeal specifically to their audience. The actual product and data may be the same, but the benefit of bespoke content for the right audience will be an increase in conversion rates to actually purchase your services, rather than simply avoiding any SEO penalties...
It's an approach which is done by many, many companies. For example, I worked for a major UK publisher with 5 magazines all covering the same topic area, but one was aimed at beginners, one was for advanced users, and others concentrated on specific niches within the market...
-
Hi Dave,
I'm struggling to understand your scenario. So are you looking to have all searches result in landing on pages within one domain, or will they remain on their respective domains?
-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
-
SEO page descriptions on mobile - how to hide while preserving the juice for SEO?
Hi everybody, On our pages we have crafted good text paragraphs for SEO purposes. On desktop everything is fine but on mobile the paragraph of text pushes the main content really low on the page. Is there a way of hiding the text while preserving the SEO juices and not getting penalised by Google for spamming techniques? I'd appreciate any recommendations on how to deal with this. Thanks very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Firebox0 -
Content with Read More..?
How does google see content that's static on page & content that has a "see more" or "read more" tag. Where the content collapses & de-collapses on a mouse click. On a condition that the complete is readable via the source code view as well as crawl-able by spiders?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
If a website Uses <select>to dropdown some choices, will Google see every option as Content Or Hyperlink?</select>
If a website Uses <select> to dropdown some choices, will Google see every option as Content Or Hyperlink?</select>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Combining 2 Websites
Any assistance/feedback is greatly appreciated. The scenario: We currently own two website, and we'd like to combine them and eliminate some expenses. Although the content is very similar in nature, it is not exact. www.KF.com that is managed by a third-party provider & www.KFA.com that is managed by the manufacturer of the product we sell. (*sites url's are not accurate) We have ended the contract of KF.com, however, this site has the best SERP/SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FX4nWOO
We assume we'll take a hit, no matter what we do - however when it comes to SEO, but what is the right move to make? Do a domain "Transfer/Redirect" of KF to KFA.com or Do we simply change the KFA.com to KF.com? Still very much a rookie when it comes to this stuff. I do have the ability to SEO the KFA.com webiste. Hoping this makes sense - and apologize for the bad url's just not sure I can actually post the true addresses. Thanks in advance.0 -
Frames and SEO
In the old days frames were a problem because they could end up being orphaned pages that get indexed and appear in the SERPS but had to navigation so they were useless. Are frames still a problem with Google and if so what are the suggested solutions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | siteoptimized0 -
SEO from links in frames?
A site was considering linking to us. Their web page is delivered entirely via frames. Humans can see the links on the page, but it's not visible in source. I'm guessing it means Google can't detect the links, and there is no SEO effect, but I wanted to confirm. Here's the site: http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Example links are the Princeton Review and Kaplan on the right sidebar. Here's the source code: view-source:http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Do those links have any SEO impact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
What next with SEO
I've been working on my site for over 2 years and have some very good links and now have a PageRank 4. My site has fallen down from page 1 to page 4 for 'Web Design London' which may be due to not putting much work into link building in the last 6 months. The site is pretty well optimised onsite but there are less that 20 pages of content. With time constraints in place because I have to run the business, would it be better to increase the content, seek out more links or outsource the work. Ideally I would do both but money and time restrict this. If I was to outsource, do you have recommendations and rough prices? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wpwebdesignlondon0 -
Panda 2.5
I'm sure we have all read about the latest round of Google's algorithm changes also known as the "Panda 2.5" updates. This latest update seems to have hit some pretty large press release sites including PR Newswire and Businesswire (both of these have a great page rank and domain authority making them a great tool for SEO's in regards to inbounds links). Ultimately this update has directly affected their sites traffic, keyword rankings, and the number of indexed pages in Google. But what will this do to our smaller sites that benefit from these great links? Will these panda updates continue to target these content farms and lower their domain authority? Will that extrapolate out and effect the domain authority of our sites? What are your thoughts for those of us that utilize these services, should we re-evaluate our process? I look forward to a great discussion. Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0