Negative SEO impact of two Similar Domains on Same IP
-
Our ecommerce company has acquired a former competitor which has similar content & largely sells the same set of products. Both domains run on the same ecommerce platform version and do well organically on an overlapping set of keywords. Currently the websites are separate instances which are hosted separately. There is no interlinking or cross branding between the sites.
Since each brand has strong equity & SEO, there are no plans to combine brands or domains.
For several reasons, it would be ideal to combine platform instances and hosting, but we are concerned about potential SEO impact of shared IP addresses.
Is it likely that moving the sites to the same IP/C-Block could have a negative SEO impact since they rank on the same keywords. Would Google devalue one site if they were seen to be connected or owned by the same company?
I know this issue has been addressed for domains with more variance between products and content, but since there is a large overlap (but not duplicate content) between our two domains, we wanted additional insight.
Obviously there are other SEO factors when you move a site, but we are currently trying to understand this specific factor.
Thanks Community for your help!
-Amber
-
Hi Amber
The server or IP address has little to no effect on SEO. Your biggest concern is having a server that is close to your audience in terms of geographic location, that it is fast, and that you are not encumbered by the traffic to any other sites sharing the same IP.
For this reason, always go for a dedicated server which will have it's own unique IP and SSL certificate. Locate the second site on a separate server. The fact that they share the same neighbourhood or range of IP's is irrelevant.
We have covered this before so this thread might be of interest to you:
https://moz.com/community/q/ip-address-of-server-an-seo-factor
I hope that helps,
Kind Regards
Nigel
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
-
Migration to a new domain
Hi everyone, So i have one project where I'm planning to move current content on new domain, two reasons: 1. It seems current domain has some google penalty (backlink related, not manual) 2. Client wants rebranding and already has domain with new brand name. So as content is high quality and there is no content related penalty from google, what would be the best way to migrate existing content without passing any penalty AND without Google treating it as duplicate content. If i do 301 i suspect any penalty there is might follow, if i just copy existing content it won't be original content, what is the best solution here? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joelsemy0 -
Domain name change
Here's the scenario... Client has two domain names: domain.com - targeting one country (Australia) otherdomain.com - targeting all other countries Both have identical products, but different currencies (AU$ and US$). The problem (as most of you will know) is that without using a sub-domain or country-code top-level domains, Google has no idea which domain should be served for which domain. Furthermore, because the root domain is different, Google doesn't see any connection between the two - other than the fact they have identical products! My recommendation to the client is to change to: domain.com to domain.com.au otherdomain.com to domain.com Arguably, we could leave the second one alone. But I think it's better for the brand to use the same root domain for each. Obviously this means both will need to be redirected. Since NONE of the pages within the sites will change, do we need to redirect every page, or just the root domain? Any other risks or concerns we should know about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Redirect domain or keep separate domains in each country?
Hi all Hoping this might be something that can be answered given the number of variables 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IsaCleanse
My main site is www.isacleanse.com.au (Obviously targeted to Australian Market) and also www.isacleanse.co.nz targeted to NZ. The main Keywords im targeting are 'Isagenix' for both and also Isagenix Australia, Isagenix Perth, Sydney (Australian cities) and Isagenix NZ, Isagenix New Zealand, Isagenix Auckland etc.. for NZ The Australian site gets a lot more traffic and Australian market gets a lot more searches - I also have a section www.isacleanse.com.au/isagenix-new-zealand/ on the Australian site. The question is am I best off redirrecting the .co.nz domain completley to the Australian Domain to give it extra SEO Juice?0 -
Consolidating two different domains to point at same site, duplicate content penalty?
I have two websites that are extremely similar and want to consolidate them into one website by pointing both domain names at one website. is this going to cause any duplicate content penalties by having two different domain names pointing at the same site? Both domains get traffic so i don't want to just discontinue one of the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron100 -
Domain authority imrpovement
Hi all, I'm trying to increase the domain authority of the www.gpmsummit.com. Is there any advice to improve it efficiently? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WTGEvents0 -
Video SEO
Hello All! I'm wondering about the best way to link build and carry on my video trend. I love to create video's with all of my articles as I feel it adds an extra element to just boring old text! The problem is that my current 25 links from Youtube are all NoFollow. This didn't originally bother me, but it's starting too. Is there a couple of websites that I could upload my article/ video to and gain a link from in a similar manner? Come to think of it, is this a good SEO tactic to use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul_Tovey0 -
A very basic seo question
Sorry, been a long day and wanted a second opinion on this please.... I am developing an affiliate store which will have dozens of products in each category. We will not be indexing the product pages themselves as they are all duplicate content. The plan is to have just the first page of the category results indexed as this will have unique content about the products in that section. The later pagnated pages (ie pages 2,3,4,5 etc) will have 12 products on each but no unique content. Would the best advice be to add a canonical tag to all pages in the 'chairs' category pointing to the page with the first 12 results and the descriptions? This would ensure that the visitors are able to browse many pages of product but google won't index products 13 and onwards. Am I right in my thinkings? A supplemental question. What is the best way to block google from indexing/crawling 90,000 product listings which are pulled direct from the merchant so are not unique in the least. I have previous played with banning google from the product folder but it reports health issues in webmaster tools. Would the best route be a no index tag on all the product pages and to no follow all the products in the category listings? Many thanks Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Exact match domain or root domain for speedy SEO?
I am doing SEO for a website that has constantly rotating and only temporarily pertinent subjects on it. Let's say these information and subject cycles go for about 6 months. Assuming this would it be more effective to optimize exact match domains for each 6 month cycle or make a main domain with a few of the keywords and just target a page for each roaming subject? Advantage of the subject is I get domain authority to feed off of, advantage of the exact match is, of course exact match domains are a powerful tool to rank highly and it is only a medium competitive market, usually about 40 domain and page authority. What do you guys think? Do you have any techniques to dominate temporary and rotating markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0