Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

I have two particular clients who I built websites for and they work in the same industry as one another. To add to this, they both have the same geographical location. So, for example when you search Google for 'fencing contractors in [county]' they both appear underneath each other next to the map and have the same address.

The problem is that client A doesn't rank as well as client B and client B seems to get outranked by its Yell listing. Both websites are similar in size and markup structure. The content although based on the same topic is written differently and isn't exactly sparse. Client A launched their website probably about 6 months before client B.

I have a hunch that Google may be penalising client B, thinking that it is in fact the same business as client A due to their physical location or is somehow trying to copy client A. Does this hunch have much ground in the SEO world and if it is possible, what are my options to help remedy the situation?

Unfortunately I've never had the situation where two competitors of each other are literally in adjacent offices!

Ideas anyone?

Does your website force 'www.'?

Both yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com are separate sites and can have different pages spidered.

As TommyTan says:

For large redirect projects, you should redirect all that you want to keep the value from.  Don't mass redirect to a single page, as most won’t end up passing value, so keep all redirects pointed to pages which are relevant to the original.

You will have to wait a little while for search engines to recrawl and update their indexes. For a clean switchover that pushes all existing link juice to the new pages I'd do them at once.