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 a website - SEO implicataions
Im looking to relaunch a current website, that will undergo a complete makeover. Can you you tell me what factors I need to consider in doing this, particularly with regards to maintaining seo and migrating the current site in general
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aplnzmarch180 -
What is internal like structure best for website
I want to construct website internal like structure better, can you advise me what's model architecture to build menu, navigation, build link, hub content will good for audience and search engine. Thank your advise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dunghv360 -
How to jumpstart the new parent company site?
A client operates four well known brands inside the industry, and each website has a relatively (for the industry) high amount of Domain authority across these four sites. They just formed a group of these four brands and launched a new website with no authority. What steps would you take to instantly grow the authority of the new site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Socialrocketco1 -
Company Blog at a different URL
Ok, I have been doing a lot of work over the past 6 months, disavowing low quality links from spammy directories to our company website, etc. However, my efforts seem to have had a negative, not positive effect. This has brought me back to reconsidering what we are doing as we have lost a good amount of traction on the nationwide Google rankings specifically. Considering our company blog - platinumcctv(dot)net - we have used this blog for a long time to inform customers of new products, software developments and then to provide them links to purchase those components. Last week, I revamped the nearly default wordpress theme to another on a piece of advice. However, someone told me that all of our links should be nofollow, even though it is a company blog because we have many links coming from this domain, and it could be found as spammy. Potato/Potato - But before I start the tedious task of changing every link to no follow on a whim, i searched a lot, but have found no CLEAR substantiation of this. Any ideas? Other recommendations appreciated as well! Platinum-CCTV(dot)com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PTCCTV0 -
Can I duplicate my websites content on Ebay Store?
Our company is setting up a store on Ebay. Is it okay to duplicate our content descriptions on our ebay store with a link going back to our website? Or would this potentially hurt us in Search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hfranz0 -
Question about multiple websites in same field
I know what most people say that it is best to only have the 1 website for focus but if we can put this to the back of our minds, if we create 2 different websites that are totally different designs (one upmarket one and one targeting the cheaper market) but in the same fields (printing) and go after 80% of the same keywords is this ok (could we be penalized). Please note we will not be interlinking the websites, the website .will be on different servers and the names will be registered under different people (2 partners in the business). We will however be accessing webmaster tools from the same location.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
What is the best process to move a wordpress website ?
Hello Seomoz community, Simple question , i am looking forward to move a word press website from blog.domain.com sub domain to domain.com/blog to increase my indexed link on the root domain indexed by search engine.The blog i want to move already have high PR ( 6 ) i , of course want to avoid broken link , already indexed in search engine. What would be the best way to process to prepare this move accordingly on a SEO perspective ??? Many thanks in advance. Yan Desjardins
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SherWeb0 -
One Website - Local + National Ranking
If a client (e.g. a winery) wants to rank both nationally and locally, what are some best practices for doing this on one Website? So the goal is to: Rank nationally for their wines, wine varietals, etc.so they're found by restaurants, distributors, customers (could include national directories, content creation ,etc.) Rank locally for their tasting room and wines for people looking locally or looking at that specific region (this could also include include Google places, local directories, etc.). I'm wondering if the site would need to be subdivided (or "siloed") where one section is heavily focused on national and another is on regional? Also, for the home page, which focus would be most important (maybe national because it's harder)? Thanks a for any ideas! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DirectionSEO0