Two sites with same content
-
Hi Everyone,
I am having two listing websites. Website A&B are marketplaces
-
Website A approx 12k listing pages
-
Website B :
-
approx 2k pages from one specific brand.
-
The entire 2k listings on website B do exist on website A with the same URL structure with just different domain name.
-
Just header and footer change a little bit. But body is same code.
The listings of website B are all partner of a specific insurance company. And this insurance company pays me to maintain their website. They also look at the traffic going into this website from organic so I cannot robot block or noindex this website. How can I be as transparent as possible with Google. My idea was to apply a canonical on website B (insurance partner website) to the same corresponding listing from website A. Which would show that the best version of the product page is on website A. So for example :www.websiteb.com/productxxx would have a canonical pointing to : www.websitea.com/productxxxwww.websiteb.com/productyyy would have a canonical pointing to www.websitea.com/productyyyAny thoughts ? Cheers
-
-
I like how Nigel thinks
-
Hi Evoe
If the partner is paying you to maintain Website B then it is vitally important that you keep that one alive. In this case, I would canonicalise the other way round so that all of their pages on Website A are canonicalised to Website B. You would need to make the pages different from website A to continue to rank.
However
If you do not do this then Website B will disappear all together form SERPS and the company will not see any activity.
If it was my site I would remove Website B completely and canonicalize their pages to the version on Website A, (as you have suggested) but bear in mind that they will not be able to see Website B. When you canonicalize to A the organic traffic will collapse anyway so you may as well remove it.
Then you can report the stats for their pages on Website A, the primary site.
You cannot keep both with canonicals as you have said and still get organic traffic to Website B!
Regards Nigel
-
Seems like you'll be well covered as long as you take the time to ensure that the conical URLs are correctly applied to the site & have some sort of testing processes in place.
-
Evoe,
Your plan is a good one assuming: (1) you want searchers to see insurance website A vs insurance partner website B pages in search results; and (2) you're okay with Google Search Console consolidating all search metrics into the canonical URL in performance reports.
.
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
-
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, So I have my great content (that contains a link to our site) that I want to distribute to high quality relevant sites in my niche as part of a link building campaign. Can I distribute this to lots of sites? The reason I ask is that those sites will then have duplicate content to all the other sites I distribute the content to won;t they? I this duplication bad for them and\or us? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Microsite as a stand-alone site under one domain and sub-domained under another: duplicate content penalty?
We developed and maintain a microsite (example: www.coolprograms.org) for a non-profit that lives outside their main domain name (www.nonprofit-mainsite.org) and features content related to a particular offering of theirs. They are utilizing a Google Grant to run AdWords campaigns related to awareness. They currently drive traffic from the AdWords campaigns to both the microsite (www.coolprograms.org) and their main site (www.nonprofit-mainsite.org). Google recently announced a change in their policy regarding what domains a Google Grant recipient can send traffic to via AdWords: https://support.google.com/nonprofits/answer/1657899?hl=en. The ads must all resolve to one root domain name (nonprofit-mainsite.org). If we were to subdomain the microsite (example: coolprograms.nonprofit-mainsite.org) and keep serving the same content via the microsite domain (www.coolprograms.org) is there a risk of being penalized for duplicate content? Are there other things we should be considering?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marketing-iq0 -
Above the Fold Content
How important is the placement of unique content "Above the Fold". Will attention grabbing images suffice or must their be a lot of unique text?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Two sites, two domains, two brands, 98% same content
There are two affiliated brick & mortar retail stores moving into e-commerce. For non-marketing reasons separate e-commerce websites are desired. The two brands are based in separate (nearby) cities in the same Canadian province. Although the store name and branding will be different, the content on the site will either be near duplicates or exact duplicates. The more I look into this on Google and SEOmoz QA, the more I am concerned about the SEO implications of this. SEOmoz QA: Multiple cities/regions websites - duplicate content? "So, yes, because you are offering the same services at second location, you are thinking correctly about the need to rewrite all content so it's not a duplicate of site #1." Duplicate content - Webmaster Tools Help "However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic… In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results. ... Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results." Unfortunately, I would say there's very little chance that rewritten content will happen in the foreseeable future. With that said, I'd be greatly appreciative of the concerns and remedies that the SEOmoz community has to offer (even if they're for future use). Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GOODSIR0 -
How to promote good content?
Our team just finished a massive piece of content.. very similar to the SEOmoz Begginer's Guide to SEO, but for the salon/aesthetics industry. We have a beautifully designed 10 Chapter, 50-page PDF which will require an email form submission to download. Each chapter is optimized for specific phrases, and will be separate HTML pages that are publicly available... very much like how this is setup: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo My question is, what's the best way to promote this thing? Any specific examples would be ideal. I think blogger outreach would likely be the best approach, but is there any specific way that I should be doing this?.. Again a specific start-to-finish example is what I'm looking for here. (I've read almost every outreach post on moz, so no need to reference them) Anyone care to rattle off a list of ideas with accompanying examples? (even if they seem like no-brainers.. I'm all ears)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Ajax Content Indexed
I used the following guide to implement the endless scroll https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started crawlers and correctly reads all URLs the command "site:" show me all indexed Url with #!key=value I want it to be indexed only the first URL, for the other Urls I would be scanned but not indexed like if there were the robots meta tag "noindex, follow" how I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wwmind1