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Yes, but if the two sites are running off the same hosting environment, Google might get a little unhappy with that. But, all in all, I agree about the premise of hundreds of people using the same themes.

@Federico - I understand what you're saying and to a degree I agree, but for this case I want the two sides of the company to be very much visually linked. The services are different, however, they fall under the same umbrella. Think actual services (web, seo, etc.) and then consulting. Similar, but different. I'll take your thoughts into account though, I don't want to make a snappy decision. Cheers

@Branagan That's exactly what I thought, but I'm fairly confident that I've read about duplicate design penalties over the years, so I just wanted to checkin and see what everyones opinion is. I did spend some time Googling for the answer and couldn't come across anything worthwhile. I'm starting to think that it won't have an effect, provided the content is unique and of high quality.

Hi Mozzers,

There are lots of articles on using multiple domains for a company and we all know the story behind that. I have a different question though - I designed and built a really great WordPress theme for my company and it runs on xyz.com and has run on their for well over a year and has decent authority. I would now like to expand my business and offer a different service and I'd like to market the new service on abc.com

My question is: If I use unique content on the second domain, but the same WordPress theme, will it have a negative SEO effect on either site?

I should mention: I have my reasons for not just using the same domain for both services.

I'd love to see what everyone thinks

@Gianluca - Thank you very much for stepping in here, I know you're a busy man so this is appreciated. What you've suggested is definitely an option and I'll investigate that approach when I'm back in the office. Thank you kindly.

Unfortunately over thinking is a requirement here because the site's not ranking as it should be, and I cannot just be happy until I've made a plan unfortunately.

I appreciate your response mate, I just need someone a little more technical to assist me.

Hello fellow SEO fans, I've got a setup that I'm interested in some opinions on.

I have a website which has the following setup:

www.site.com (english version of the site)

www.site.com/nl (dutch version of the site)

Now, my experience tells me the dutch version would be written in dutch (not using Google Translate) and the meta data et al should also be in dutch. But my question is:

If somebody in, say, Netherlands perform a search in english for a specific keyword, we would want the www.site.com page to appear in the SERPs, not the www.site.com/nl page, because the person has searched in english. However, because there's a www.site.com/nl page, purely the /nl page will be optimized and linked to in order to rank it higher in the SERPs for dutch searches and not english searches? But if that's the case, then the person in the Netherlands searching for the english version of the keyword, probably won't see www.site.com in the ranks because of targeting and keyword distribution?

Bit of a tricky situation that I've been pondering over and can't quite put the nail on the head.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Ah, you know what the problem with SEMRush is, they don't cater for Traffic in South Africa, which is where I am based

SEMRush is a fantastic piece of software and I completely forgot about it. I was really hoping SEOmoz would have a tool, but it seems not. Thank you Streamline Metrics

Cheers Billy! I'll keep looking and see what others can say, and then give you a shout.

Worst comes to worst, I could use something like WebCEO to find the keywords on my site and then SEOmoz' Rank Checker to see the positions, just felt it would be incredibly useful to have an "all in one" solution because sometimes we miss really important keywords, that turn out to be ranking really well. I know Google Analytics can pick that up sometimes, but that's more about intuition than an actual tool.

Hi Aidan,

I've always been a big fan of on-site SEO, so when it comes to this sort of thing, I've spent a lot of time doing trial and error with all sorts of combinations. Here are my thoughts based on my feedback:

1. "keyword | keyword" is better than "keyword|keyword".
2. Writing a meta title that reads as a sentence is better than "keyword | keyword"

So for example, I might actually go for:

"Great Chocolate Cake recipes for Christmas"

Instead of actually trying to stuff all the keywords in. If you're desperate for 3 keywords on a page, then make use of other on-site factors to achieve this, stuffing them into the title won't get you the desired result - at least, that's what my experience shows.

Hope that helps

Hey James,

I have to tell you, I have a number of websites that I look after that have incredibly long parameter URLs and/or horribly unfriendly URLs, but none of the sites rank badly because the rest of the SEO is done well and completely white hat. So, off the bat, I say you shouldn't worry too much.

If you have a URL such as www.carfind.com?make=honda&price=20000&color=red&year=2005... but obviously on your site, is Google indexing these URLs? Surely they're just dynamic searches essentially? Each car on the website has an actual absolute URL? It's the absolute URLs that I would worry about, and I'd rather put my time and effort into that than changing search queried URLs.

Just my opinion based on sites I've worked on

Cheers.

How about www.linkdetective.com, fidelityim?

Did you have a look at the file I made for you? Hope so, took me 20 minutes to compile and all

As William said, look for 301 or 302 mentioned in the .htaccess file, if those are mentioned there, that's a sign that things are being redirected.

A rebuild is always useful, but of course, the budget probably isn't there and I can respect that.

Let us know about the .htaccess file..

Hi Barret,

Have you watched these two Whiteboard Friday's by SEOmoz:

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUrl6p53yfo
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5649gtXA4o

These aren't new videos, but there is a good amount of information in the mix that you could learn from.

Otherwise, a simple search on the SEOmoz Blog or Search Engine Watch will reveal an assortment of great links to read.

Hope that helps!

Hi folks,

Something I've never had to do before so I'm not sure which tool to use, but is there a way to determine the keywords that a website currently ranks for?

Hope someone can assist

Hi Prime85,

There's quite a bit to this actually. I see that the link to "Plastic Bins", actually clicks through to monsterbins.com, ie. a different website. The crux of the matter here is that a link from the plastic-bins.com/plastic-shelf-bins/ website to the monsterbins.com website will add value provided the plastic-bins.com page has a decent authority and is relavant to the page it is linking too. So, in other words, you can use the Mozbar to see the page authority of the plastic-bins.com/plastic-shelf-bins/ page and compare that to the page it's linking too. Ideally, you'd want the authority to be the same or more on the plastic-bins.com/plastic-shelf-bins/ page and to ensure that the content is relevant (not duplicate either).

If you're hoping for those links to offer value through to monsterbins.com, I would suggest taking time to carefully look at the SEO on the pages, I see issues in your meta data and other areas. The SEOmoz On-Page Optimization tool is a fantastic tool to assist you with this.

I hope that helps?

Unfortunately over thinking is a requirement here because the site's not ranking as it should be, and I cannot just be happy until I've made a plan unfortunately.

I appreciate your response mate, I just need someone a little more technical to assist me.