Two divisions, same parent company, identical websites
-
A client of mine has intentionally built two websites with identical content; both companies sell the same product, one via an 80 year old local brand, well known. The other division is a national brand, new, and working to expand. The old and new divisions cannot be marketed as a single company for legal reasons. My life would be simple if the rules for distinguishing between nation's could apply, but I only have city X, and The U.S. I understand there is no penalty for duplicate content per se but I need to say to Google, "if searcher is in city X, serve content X. If not, serve content U.S. Both sites have atrocious DA and from what GA tells me, the National content appears to have never been served in a SERP in 3 years. I've been asked to improve visibility for both sites.
-
Hi, Katarina! Thanks for this very thorough response - I'm beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel. When you say stress the address via directories, you are referring to making sure my external listings and directories are current, consistent, correct, yes? Just confirming you are not recommending something internal to the site? We are writing out driving directions where possible, and using the google maps api to display the location.
Also, we won't have unique images for the products - I might be able to do something to edit them differently, but they are the same thing. Will naming them uniquely matter?
For the rest, we are writing, writing, writing! The client had no idea their former developer (yup, they paid someone to do this to them) had done a bad thing, and when I first read their GA and MOZ data (before we really dove into the content on each page and realized it had literally been pasted from one site to the other), I thought the data had to be wrong, ha!
We're pursuing the suggestion about unique content, and think we have a way way to enough of it to matter. Thanks for taking the time to answer. I will try to post some before and after scores when we are done.
-
Hi,
when you are saying 2 websites - are they completely different domains? In this case you need to rewrite the content. I cannot see how just different images would tell Google there isnt another identical website or a website with 90% of duplicated content.
I would suggest the following:
1. Keep the product names the same (unless you are allowed to change them) but make sure your images and descriptions are different.
2. Add completely different testimonials, reviews and case studies
3. Add completely different About us/Meet the team pages
4. Differentiate as much of content as you can and add extra sections where unique content can be added.
5. Don't replicate your backlinking strategy
6. Based on the areas targeted, find out about how effective geo redirects would be
7. Stress the address/location targeted via content, directories, G Maps
Simply flood the websites with a lot of unique content, change or at least reword what can be reworded. Make % of the duplicated content as minimal as you can.
I hope this helps. Challenging. Good luck!
Katarina
-
Thank you! When I add photos, should I name them with locations in mind? Or are you saying that by having different photos, the search engines will recognize different content?
Also - the employees and leadership are the same, even the external partners are the same. But I could be careful about how employee bios are added - so the content is not duplicate, but unique on each site, so that's a good resource for unique content, if I plan carefully and keep it in mind. Thank you!
Driving directions are written out on the local site (the national site is digital), but I am thinking I might be able to reference a location in the testimonial or home city of the person offering the testimonial.
-
My friends this is a big challenge for you as MichaelAMG mentioned, if you do not care about the content of the sites both will hurt each other. So this are some tips for multi-location businesses do to help improve their location pages
1. Use testimonials
2. Write out driving directions
3. Create employee bios
4. Add photos -
You feel my pain! LOL, thanks. We are trying to rewrite content now, but their product offering (how they name their products, describe them, etc). are IDENTICAL. The business partners they link to and how they describe those offers are IDENTICAL. The most I can hope for is to never mention the city of the parent organization on the national site, EVER and to mention it A LOT on the city based site. We are hoping a top level blog with posts containing lots of city based v. national based keywords will help some, too. Do you think if I pair weekly geo-sensitive blog posts with improved geo-sensitive page content, I will have a chance of defining separate content for "near me" geolocation purposes? We are working on robust on page content with the proper geolocation keyword references now.
-
That sounds rough. What you will want to do is alter your content for your single city based website to reflect that you serve that city, then when Google is looking for a match for a person near that city, it should see that site as the best match do to the weight it puts on geolocation. In the long run, you will want to re-write all of your content on one site so that your two sites will not be hurting each other or look like copy/paste spam sites.
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
-
Relaunching website in two phases - 301 redirect approach
Hey Mozzers, Interested to know your thoughts on the following situation. I am relaunching a website with an updated URL structure in TWO phases. Phase one will be a much smaller version of the site, with 30% of the pages going live - the remaining 70% of page won't be available until Phase two. In Phase one, these 30% of pages will be 301 redirected from their like-for-like versions - old site to new site. The remaining 70%... because the like-for-like pages won't be available until Phase two, which is likely to be launched in 3 months time, should I do a temporary redirect on these pages (302) to the new homepage for the time being, until the new versions of the pages are live - and then implement the 301 from old url to new url. A bit of a messy situation, and not ideal for SEO, but my hands are tied as the organisation is pushing ahead with this phased approach. So, interested to hear your thoughts on an appropriate 301 migration plan.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWesley0 -
Stolen website content
Hello, recently we had a lot of content written for our new website. Unfortunately me and my partner have went separate ways, and he has used all my unique content on his own website. All our product descriptions, about us etc, he simply changed the name of the company. He has agreed to take the content down, so that i can now put this content on our new website which is currently being designed. Will google see this as duplicate content as it has been on a website before? Even though the content has been removed from the original website. I was worried as the content is no longer "fresh" so to speak. Can any one help me with this,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Scarce niche websites for link building
Hello! A small company from Mexico that offers cleaning services for home & businesses wants to rank on the first page of Google. The Good: Every month they give away stuff (discounts and/or a free service) and they also participate in campaigns that support non-profitable organizations & charity. So there is plenty of material for me to build some backlinks and to create some interesting content. Their competitors have 0 SEO. I have been doing my homework and none of their competitors websites that are ranking on the top 5 are doing any kind of SEO. But they have had their website for a long time and they probably have a decent amount of traffic per day. Open Site Explorer shows minimal to no websites pointing to them. Google Adwords has increased their sales. They are using virtually nothing as budget and it is helping, but they want organic SEO. The Bad: Blogs seem to be dead in Mexico. And that is one of my strongest ways to create backlinks. I usually get a blogger to write about the company I'm working for to create backlinks and works like a charm in countries were SEO is prehistoric. Usually it takes me very little effort to accomplish a website to rank very well in this kind of scenario, but I'm having trouble this time. The Something: I have been able to boost their rankings with basic SEO in a month but I'm stuck in page #2-5 on their most important keywords. The Ugly: I'm out of ideas. And their budget isn't good enough to apply paid strategies. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eblan0 -
Unable to Crawl my Website
Hi all, I have a website that I am trying to promote, but tried to add it here in SEOMoz and got the following message: We have detected that the root domain evolving-networks.co.uk does not respond to web requests. Using this domain, we will be unable to crawl your site or present accurate SERP information. Does anyone know why this website cannot be crawled? Please help. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LSDigital0 -
Optimising a Dynamic website ?
A client has bought the Nostalgia wp theme. I've installed Yoast but because the website is ajax based and the content for the pages are dynamically loaded the plugin won't work. Or at least not to my knowledge? The developer doesn't currently have a solution, which from previous expereience it will never be supported. So I need some possible solutions here. Create a mobile site? Cons more time, more money etc Create non dynamic pages linked in footer area. Cons page duplication etc. It's a small niche so having the basic elements is imperative to getting it ranking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StephenForde0 -
How does Google see an article in two languages?
Hi, We are translating our articles into French (they are already in English) and are considering Cantonese & Mandarin. How does Google see this? Say I post an article on Diabetes Symptoms in English, Cantonese and French. Same article, different languages. Does Google look at this as three separate articles, ranking you uniquely, or does it count as one article? Thanks, Erin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | erinhealthchoices0 -
SeoMoz Crawler Shuts Down The Website Completely
Recently I have switched servers and was very happy about the outcome. However, every friday my site shuts down (not very cool if you are getting 700 unique visitors per day). Naturally I was very worried and digged deep to see what is causing it. Unfortunately, the direct answer was that is was coming from "rogerbot". (see sample below) Today (aug 5) Same thing happened but this time it was off for about 7 hours which did a lot of damage in terms of seo. I am inclined to shut down the seomoz service if I can't resolve this immediately. I guess my question is would there be a possibility to make sure this doesn't happen or time out like that because of roger bot. Please let me know if anyone has answer for this. I use your service a lot and I really need it. Here is what caused it from these error lines: 216.244.72.12 - - [29/Jul/2011:09:10:39 -0700] "GET /pregnancy/14-weeks-pregnant/ HTTP/1.1" 200 354 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; UrlCrawler; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot)" 216.244.72.11 - - [29/Jul/2011:09:10:37 -0700] "GET /pregnancy/17-weeks-pregnant/ HTTP/1.1" 200 51582 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; UrlCrawler; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot)"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jury0