Hi Tej

I am an eCommerce specialist and come across this question all the time.

It is far better having one core product with colour and size as attributes feeding off the one page. You then have, for example, a simple non-colour specific URL with the colour and the size as drop downs or swatches that the potential customer can choose from.

Doing it this way you can focus all of your writing efforts in producing a block of keyword rich and contextually strong product description. You do not need to think about the colours which may well come in and out of stock.

By doing it this way you don't split the ranking across the 5 colours (say) weakening every one of them in SERPS (Search Rankings) Imagine having to write 5 different descriptions to describe the colour variations. Yes!, it just ain't going to happen!

One super strong page with colour and size as attributes will outrank any other. With a bit of luck, your competitors will be doing it the one page/one colour way and you will smugly outrank them!

You will never rank well for one colour one page variation. The reason is that they are 90% the same content with only the colour, different. There is one thing that Google hates and that is duplication and while there is no physical penalty you are asking Google to choose one of the variations - the result is they rank none of them highly!

I hope that helps

Nigel

Carousel Project.

Hi Marc,

The answer to this question really depends on just how much effort you want to put into the two websites and frankly what your resources are. There are many companies that successfully run different operations, Zappos and 6pm is one example.

The upsides:

1. Different target market - allows for different branding appealing to separate segments of the market
2. Different pricing strategy - allows for one site to be a 'marketplace' and the other, a full price site.
3. Different locations - One may target England, say, the other Wales & Scotland.
4. Dominate Google - Both sites may appear at the top of SERPS if enough SEO is thrown at them - therefore increasing real estate in top 10.

So there are definite upsides to having a dual site approach.

The Downsides:

1. The work involved in building and maintaining two websites. You have already said that one of them is not responsive, so I assume that is the case because you either didn't have the time or the funds to make it so.
2. Ongoing operational operations - uploading of content and rewriting for the two sites, banners, product photographs, ALTs, promotions - keeping everything separate will be a daily challenge.
3. NAPS - presumably the name & address is identical for the two sites, what about the host and IP addresses?
4. Maintaining a balance of attention to the two operations and serving the niches they are targetted at.
5. Marketing costs associated with two separate sites and brandings.
6. Marketplace links to Amazon, Ebay etc and associated costs.
7. Socials - maintaining two separate groups of Social Media accounts.

I ran an online shoe store for many years and we set up a 'sister' site which focused purely on Women's fashion. I quickly found that we lacked the resources to run two websites and ended up redirecting all of the second site links back to the first - just because of all the headaches involved.

If I were you and reading the 'non-responsive' comment, I would can that site and focus all of your attention on to the one main site:

1. 301 redirect the whole site page by page to the main website so that you preserve any backlink juice that may be pointing to it.
2. Write great original content 300+ words at brand and category level.
3. Write great original content 150+ words at product level.
4. Make sure ALL support pages are fully written, and optimised.
5. Make sure all META is optimised in terms of character length and relevance.
6. Make sure your site speed is as good as it can be.
7. All image Alts are filled in
8. Merge Socials

Frankly without going on, just make sure you cross all the Ts and dot all the i's when it comes to SEO and I am pretty sure that the combined effort of running one great site will far outweigh the schizoid way you are doing it now!

There are of course other issues, resources - do you actually want two brands? along with all the marketing costs? is that sensible from a business point of view?

I hope that helps to give you some encouragement.

Regards

Nigel

Carousel Projects

Hi Laurie

That's kind of old school cloaking and when you add the 301 you have told Google that the content has moved to the new URL. I can't think why you would want to do this?

For me it's a big SEO no no - even if you have teh same content on two URLs you'd still suffer a drop in rankings due to duplication issues. So you would need to canonicalise, thus losing one of teh URLs.

Regards Nigel

Hi vtmoz

It's funny you should say "so they started calling themselves on the internet 'Moz SEO' " because Moz used to be called SEOMOZ and they changed to just MOZ so that they could concentrate on building the brand. There is evidence to suggest that if an article is written about a subject and your brand is linked from that article that Google will recognise the contextuality of the article and associate your brand name with that subject.

For example, one would expect that Nike and 'sports', 'sports clothing' etc would occupy the same space. In the same way - if your brand sold Tennis Rackets, for example, Google would begin to associate your brand name with that range of products.

In the same way, when we SEOs are optimising a page we will use Keyword Explorer. The tool would give us contextually relevant keywords to use alongside a brand name in order to strengthen the SEO of a page.

So if I were writing an article on Nike and I hadn't used the words 'sports', 'sports clothing', 'sports footwear' or even 'Phil Knight', then MOZ will suggest these as relevant keywords to use to strengthen the page's SEO.

I wouldn't include them in the brand name but I would use them on a page. In this way, they become kind of 'baby anchor text' in that they surround the brand.

In order to strengthen that further, you might write an article that is submitted to a blog with a specific anchor text backlink which is not your brand name but the most relevant keyword. So if Nike wanted (and it does of course) to be found for the term 'Sports Footwear' then it would link back to its own page with that anchor text.

Very often when I am constructing Meta titles and heading for a brand page then I would use the subject after the brand as that is often the way someone may search for it in Google.

Example: I would title a page 'Clarks Boots' as the opening two words of the title and as the H1 on the page if I wanted that page to rank for the brand and the category. I would then fill the page with boot products along with a good 300 word + description of the types of Clarks boots, the gender, heels, ankle, mid, high and any other contextually relevant keywords.

I hope that goes someway to answering your question,

Regards

Nigel

Hi Michael

The problem you have is the very low value content that exists on all of those pages and the complete impossibility of writing any unique Titles, Descriptions and content. There are just too many of them.

With a footwear client of mine I no indexed a huge slug of tags taking the page count down by about 25% - we saw an immediate 22% increase in organic traffic in the first month. (March 18th 2017 - April 17th 2017) the duplicates were all size and colour related. Since canonicalising (I'm English lol) more content and taking the site from 25,000 pages to around 15,000 the site is now 76% ahead of last year for organics.  This is real measurable change.

Now the arguments:

Canonicalisation

How are you going to canonicalise 10,000+ pages ? unless you have some kind of magic bullet you are not going to be able to but lets look at the logic.

Say we have a page of Widgets (brand) and they come in 7 sizes. When the range is fully in stock all of the brand/size pages will be identical to the brand page, apart from the title & description. So it would make sense to canonicalise back to the brand. Even when sizes started to run out, all of the sizes will be on the brand page. So size is a subset of the brand page.

Similar but not the same for colour. If colour is a tag then every colour sorted page will be on the brand page. So really they are the same page - just a slimmer selection. Now I accept that the brand page will contain all colours as it did all sizes but the similarity is so great - 95 % of the content being the same apart from the colour, that it makes sense to call them the same.

So for me Canonicalisation would be the way to go but it's just not possible as there are too many of them.

Noindex

The upside of noindex is that it is generally easier to put the noindex tag on the page as there is no URL to tag. The downside is that the page is then not indexed in Google so you lose a little  juice - I would argue by the way that the chances of being found in Google for a size page is extremely slim, less than 2% of visits came from size pages before we junked them and most of those were from a newsletter so reality is <1% not worth bothering about You could leave off the nofollow so that Google crawls through all of the links on the pages - the better option.

Considering your problem and having experience of a number of sites with the same problem Noindex is your solution.

I hope that helps

Kind Regards

Nigel - Carousel Projects.

Hi Arun

It's certainly best practice to move to a root directory. As you say visitors are then coming to one domain, not a subdomain. All you need to do is page by page redirect through a 301. When you say they are being 'redirected to 301 code' this is perfectly OK. The 301 code just tells Google that the page has moved permanently.

It takes Google a short while to recognise the new pages as replacing the old ones and for that period you can see old and new in Google, causing a short period of duplication which could affect the rankings.

You just need to sit it out - by all means, do a Fetch in Search Console to help speed up the process.

Search Console>Crawl>Fetch as Google.

Regards

Nigel

Hi Becky

I have to agree with you there. The H1 should be a header for what is visible in the on-page content. These clearly are not. It won't confuse Google as it takes little notice of H2 but for me it's just a bad use of page elements.

Regards

Nigel

I think if you are going to ask a question like this them be specific what the problems are. We all spend a lot of time trying to help people and are then made to feel bad because we haven't understood the question.

Also, it's in a language I can't speak.

So post up a few keywords and the pages you expect to rank for and maybe we can see what the problem is.

Cheers

Nigel