Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your reputation grow with Reviews AI
      Moz Local

      Let your reputation grow with Reviews AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Two divisions, same parent company, identical websites

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Two divisions, same parent company, identical websites

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    7
    1097
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • kc_sunshines
      kc_sunshines last edited by

      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.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • kc_sunshines
        kc_sunshines last edited by

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Katarina-Borovska
          Katarina-Borovska last edited by

          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

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • kc_sunshines
            kc_sunshines @Roman-Delcarmen last edited by

            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.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Roman-Delcarmen
              Roman-Delcarmen last edited by

              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

              kc_sunshines 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • kc_sunshines
                kc_sunshines @Tenlo last edited by

                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.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • Tenlo
                  Tenlo last edited by

                  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.

                  kc_sunshines 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • amag

                    Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?

                    Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag
                    0
                  • jeremyskillings

                    Website Snippet Update in Search Console?

                    I have a company that I started working with that has an outdated and inaccurate snippet coming up.  See the link below. They changed their name from DK on Pittsburgh Sports to just DK Pittsburgh Sports several years ago, but the snippet is still putting the old info, including outdated and incorrect description. I'm not seeing that title or description anywhere on the site or a schema plugin.  How can we get it updated?  I have updated titles, etc. for the home page, and done a Fetch to get re-indexed.  Does Snippet have a different type of refresh that I can submit or edit? Thanks in advance https://g.co/kgs/qZAnAC

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremyskillings
                    0
                  • falguniinnovative

                    How to Submit My new Website in All Search Engines

                    Hello Everyone, Can Any body help to suggest Good software, or Any other to easily Submit my website , to All Search Engines ? ? Any expert Can help please, Thanx in Advance

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative
                    0
                  • techdesign

                    Two Different Domains exact same content

                    Hello, I suspect I know the answer to this but would like to have it confirmed. I have been speaking to a company the last couple of weeks who have 2 domains with the exact same content. Possible a third but they haven't supplied a link. This from all I've read would be a huge problem for ranking and SEO. What would be the best way to deal with this ? I did do a search and found articles/questions on same content on the same site and in articles etc but nothing about exactly the same websites on 2 domains. Cheers David.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | techdesign
                    0
                  • blackrino

                    Credit Links on Client Websites

                    I know there have been several people who have asked this but a lot of them were back in 2012 before many of the google changes. My question is the same though. With all the changes with Google's algorithm. Is it okay to put your link on the bottom of your clients website. Like Web Design by, etc. Part of the reason is to drive traffic but also if someone is actually interested who designed the website, they will click it. But now reading about how bad links can hurt you tremendously, it makes me second guess if this is ok. My gut feeling says, no.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blackrino
                    0
                  • rexjoec

                    Effects of having both http and https on my website

                    You are able to view our website as either http and https on all pages. For example: You can type "http://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as http: as you navigate the site. You can also type "https://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as https: as you navigate the site. My question is....if you can view the entire site using either http or https, is this being seen as duplicate content/pages? Does the same hold true with "www.mywebsite.com" and "mywebsite.com"? Thanks!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec
                    1
                  • AnthonyHall

                    Company name causing Google penalty?

                    Hi all, Once of my clients has a keyword as part of their company name, and it seems like the website is being given a penalty in the keyword SERP because of the amount of websites linking back using the company name? Is there anything i can do to prevent/balance this out? Thanks, Anthony

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnthonyHall
                    0
                  • pbhatt

                    301 Redirects After Company Acquisition

                    We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt
                    1

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  • Digital Marketers
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.