Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thats great advice, i'll be sure to put it to good use!

And thanks for the Yahoo analogy, i'll keep it in mind!

Thanks very much for your responses I really appreciate them.

CleverPhd -  we wouldn’t be giving total control of the domain away as we would design it, maintain it and add and remove products when we see fit. But I totally agree with you about them gaining a higher volume of organic and direct traffic and potentially doing what they want with it.

If they did decide not to sell our products it would mean ending the contract we have after an allotted time frame and either finding a new partner to design a new website and entering in a similar deal with them or start their own e-commerce operation which logistically is a huge undertaking, its taken us 15 years to build up relationships and offer the amount of products we sell so it’s not a viable option (at the minute anyway).

From the initial meeting they did stress that they didn’t want to run their online shop themselves and were happy to take a commission. They also gave a firm commitment to push the site through various media channels and their reach is huge. You said we would be at a disadvantage if the set up works out good or bad but either way we would be gaining more sales, just not increasing our brand reach through that channel. So in essence wouldn’t you just see it as separate revenue stream we could live without even if it fell apart?

Dimitri – Thanks, it looks like if we go ahead I’ll be insisting on canonical tags!

Don – Cheers for the alternatives and the offer to PM you.

I really appreciate the insight guys!

Rich

Hi guys

I have a duplicate content question I was hoping someone might be able to give me some advice on?

I work for a small company in the UK and in our niche we have a huge product range and an excellent website providing the customer with a very good experience. We’re also backed up by a bespoke warehouse/logistic management system further enhancing the quality of our product. We get most traffic through PPC and are not one of the biggest brands in the industry and have to fight for marketshare.

Recently we were approached by another company in our industry that have built up a huge and engaged audience over decades but can’t logistically tap into their following to sell the products so they have suggested a partnership. They are huge fans of what we do and basically want a copy of our site to be rebranded and hosted on a subdomain of their website and we would then pay them a commission of all the sales the new site received. So 2 identical sites with different branding would exist.

Based on tests they have carried out we could potentially double our sales in weeks and the potential is huge so we are excited about the possibility.

But…..how would we handle the duplicate content, would we be penalised? Would just one of the sites be penalised? Or if sales increase as much as we think they might, would it be worth a penalty as our current rankings aren’t great?

Any advice would be great.

Cheers

Richard

Thanks again for your valuable insight.

It appears the links have slowed down quite considerably now and I’ve read a great deal about the subject of NSEO and it seems in normal cases you can receive thousands of new links almost overnight so it doesn’t look like a major attack in my view. Although my anchor text is now heavily diluted with irrelevant terms which still worries me.

I haven’t disavowed anything yet as my reading hasn’t pointed me to anything conclusive and my rankings still seem to be slowly increasing. When you have disavowed links in the past did you also include a note to Google with an explanation of why you were doing it, as a reconsideration request was not necessary? And do you think that might flag your site up to Google and in a sense hand yourself in even though you are not responsible for the spammy links? I’m just worried (possibly more paranoid) Google will keep a record of the site and monitor it more closely in the future.

Thanks very much for your response.

I’ve identified the vast majority of new links and think I’m going to disavow them. What is interesting is that I checked out 2 of my competitors link profiles and they have also spiked over the last few weeks so we could all be under attack!

Hi guys

I was hoping someone could help me on a problem that has arisen on the site I look after. This is my first SEO job and I’ve had it about 6 months now. I think I’ve been doing the right things so far building quality links from reputable sites with good DA and working with bloggers to push our products as well as only signing up to directories in our niche. So our backlink profile is very specific with few spammy links.

Over the last week however we have received a huge increase in backlinks which has almost doubled our linking domains total. I’ve checked the links out from webmaster tools and they are mainly directories or webstat websites like the ones below

|

siteinfo.org.uk

deperu.com

alestat.com

domaintools.com

detroitwebdirectory.com

ukdata.com

stuffgate.com

|

We’ve also just launched a new initiative where we will be producing totally new and good quality content 4-5 times a week and many of these new links are pointing to that page which looks very suspicious to me. Does this look like negative Seo to anyone?

I’ve read a lot about the disavow tool and it seems people’s opinions are split on when to use it so I was wondering if anyone had any advice on whether to use it or not? It’s easy for me to identify what these new links are, yet some of them have decent DA so will they do any harm anyway?

I’ve also checked the referring anchors on Ahrefs and now over 50% of my anchor term cloud are totally unrelated terms to my site and this has happened over the last week which also worries me.

I haven’t seen any negative impact on rankings yet but if this carries on it will destroy my link profile. So would it be wise to disavow all these links as they come through or wait to see if they actually have an impact? It should be obvious to Google that there has been a huge spike in links so then the question is would they be ignored or will I be penalised. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Richard

Thanks very much for your responses I really appreciate them.

CleverPhd -  we wouldn’t be giving total control of the domain away as we would design it, maintain it and add and remove products when we see fit. But I totally agree with you about them gaining a higher volume of organic and direct traffic and potentially doing what they want with it.

If they did decide not to sell our products it would mean ending the contract we have after an allotted time frame and either finding a new partner to design a new website and entering in a similar deal with them or start their own e-commerce operation which logistically is a huge undertaking, its taken us 15 years to build up relationships and offer the amount of products we sell so it’s not a viable option (at the minute anyway).

From the initial meeting they did stress that they didn’t want to run their online shop themselves and were happy to take a commission. They also gave a firm commitment to push the site through various media channels and their reach is huge. You said we would be at a disadvantage if the set up works out good or bad but either way we would be gaining more sales, just not increasing our brand reach through that channel. So in essence wouldn’t you just see it as separate revenue stream we could live without even if it fell apart?

Dimitri – Thanks, it looks like if we go ahead I’ll be insisting on canonical tags!

Don – Cheers for the alternatives and the offer to PM you.

I really appreciate the insight guys!

Rich

Thats great advice, i'll be sure to put it to good use!

And thanks for the Yahoo analogy, i'll keep it in mind!