Microsite and main website alternate in rankings

[ViviCa1]

Hi all,

I just noticed a potential issue with our websites. We have two ecommerce websites, one is a very large one selling all sorts of products, while the microsite focuses on a small segment of products. All products sold on the microsite are also sold on the main website. In the beginning of September, we upgraded the microsite to the same script that the main website uses to make it mobile friendly and update the design. They now look very similar.

Before, both websites used to rank on page 1 for a specific keyword. I have noticed that since we upgraded the microsite, the two websites have been taking turns ranking for the keyword. For a few weeks the microsite ranks and the main website doesn't rank for the keyword. Then for a few weeks only the main website ranks and the microsite doesn't.

I think the reason this is happening is that Google understands that the content is the same and the websites are both owned by the same company. Fair enough.

1. I remember reading an article about this phenomenon before but can't remember where. Does anyone know which article I'm talking about (it would have been on an SEO blog/website, e.g. Moz, SEJ, SE Roundtable etc)? I'm not even sure what this phenomenon is called.

2. If we can only have one of the pages rank, we would prefer it to be the microsite at all times. Would a canonical tag on the main website referring to the URL on the microsite fix this?

3. I think at the moment the product descriptions are either very similar or identical. Would it help to make them more different to get both to rank again if that is what we wanted to do? In the end it is still the same product being sold by the same company - after Google has already sort of merged the two, would they "un-merge" them if the content was more different?

Thanks in advance!

[ViviCa1]

Hi Dmitrii,

Thanks, yeah we have canonicals which are self-referencing for products, so I will need to find out if we are able to manually change it on one URL.

The content on both pages is identical, which isn't great for SEO, I know. We sell a lot of (15k+) products and have one person writing product descriptions so we aren't always able to make sure the content is unique (although we do write our own descriptions, not copying the ones provided by suppliers). For the websites as a whole, the product descriptions on the microsite (where we sell about 30 products) are probably all either identical or extremely similar to the main website, but all other content is unique and of course the main website has lots more content that is unique to it, so there is just a small overlap, but for the page in question, it is probably 99% duplicate.

Personally, I'd be happy if just the microsite ranked for the keyword, but will need to discuss internally whether we want to put in the extra effort of making all product descriptions unique on the microsite.

As for relevant links, I think the microsite should have more, as it generally performs much better for keywords related specifically to its niche (which is why I don't like that it's not ranking at all for this keyword just now).

Thanks again.

[DmitriiK]

Howdy.

It seems to me that you have duplicate content issues. Do you guys have any canonicals at all? How close is the content from one website to another?

So, if you want both websites to rank for the same product, which seems a bit pointless to me, since you'll have to double up all the efforts, budgets etc, you would need to have unique content on both sites, unique descriptions, all meta tags etc.

If you want only one to rank, then yes, canonical will do it. Also the link mass will have a lot of effect. Basically, if your large site has let's say 100 times more links with relevant anchor texts and from relevant websites, it can still be ranking over the microsite.

Hope this helps