Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Aman

When it comes to duplicate content, a little bit (using the same article once or twice) will not generate any serious penalties. That will only happen if you basically feature the same site twice. Most duplicate-content related "penalties" are actually more like neutralizations of the benefits of unique content. Only the site with the original content is going to gain ranking benefits:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

In other words, it won't kill either site but you will take out on-page SEO as a factor when it comes to ranking, which will hurt you in the long run.

Here's another useful page featuring some videos you might find useful should you find yourself battling duplicate content issues:

http://moz.com/blog/how-to-defeat-duplicate-content-next-level

Also, avoid using any linking practices between the two sites - if you have this setup there are good odds you are hosting using the same services and linking to your own site will generate negative responses in the eyes of search engines.

Hope all goes well and feel free to follow up with me,

Rob

Hey Edmond,

Vic already answered with most of what I was going to say - a big thing to remember is the issue of duplicate content if you are making a direct translation. You probably want to keep all content under the same domain for potential future link-building efforts. Using the /en approach Vic suggested will help with this.

Bear in mind, however, that such an approach can result in duplicate content penalties (see: Panda) if you are not careful with the translation process. It might be better to paraphrase your content when translating it in order to avoid these penalties.

The rest depends on what aspects of the site you want to translate, where your markets are and what language your potential customers are likely to speak.

Feel free to touch base with any questions,

Rob

Hi there,

Alick is right about this - you want to make your brand and keywords prominent in your Title tags and Meta Descriptions. Generally speaking, as long as these change from page to page (i.e. "Brand"), you will be okay.

We performed work for a client recently who was using default dynamic tags for their Meta data and were suffering penalties for it due to the overlapping duplicate issues. When we instituted the solution Alick mentions above, we cut those problems out of the equation very quickly.

Rather than worry about the Meta data, it sounds like you should be looking at optimizing your site structure for crawling and determining your leading brands - just a suggestion.

Hope it works out and feel free to get in touch if you have further questions,

Rob

Hi there,

from what I understand of your premise, you are asking whether you should create multiple backlinks from the same sources to each of your 20 pages. There are 2 issues you have to contend with here:

1. Backlink density and propogation

As far as acquiring links goes, the key factor here is not so much the number of links you acquire, but the quality they provide your site. After gaining a link to your domain from another domain, the value of future links to your domain from the same domain diminishes, making this an extremely poor expenditure of resources on your part. For example, Google wants to see multiple domains linking to individual pages on your site rather than the same sources connecting to your site over and over on different pages. This approach is just more natural in its appearance.

Here is an updated guide to general link-building. I think this would do you some good:

http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building

2. Backlink locality

Since you operate a website purely in the U.K., links from outside your country will likely be less relevant geographically if they come from other countries, but the pages being linked may not matter. For example, blogs involving tips to fix a leaky faucet or a clogged drain are likely to be equally valid regardless of who writes them or from where. On the other hand, if your site is attempting to find customers for a plumbing client of yours, it doesn't make sense to get links from plumbing material manufacturers in Texas if you work in the U.K.

To illustrate this, here is a personal favorite of mine from Rand:

http://moz.com/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

See also:

http://moz.com/blog/are-on-topic-links-important-whiteboard-friday (on-topic vs. off-topic links)

In short, stick to 1 link per domain to your site unless there is something extremely relevant to your site and you feel the extra effort of building that link is worth it. Links built from UK sources are likely to be more valuable to your overall, but you can also find relevant information and data from international sources depending on the topic (in this case, informational pieces, perhaps in regards to DIY plumbing projects).

Hope this helps and feel free to follow up with further questions,

Rob

Hi Tamir,

Matt has already done a great job in answering this and I would add just a small side note - my guess for the new domain came from someone reading that keyword matching between domains and content was a great way to get better results in SERPs. It's antiquated thinking but that's what it looks like (adding "travel" to the domain in the hopes that potential customers would better understand what they were all about).

As Matt said, the big issue is the way the redirects were handled (should be 301'd to a similar site structure for the smallest possible rankings impact). If you were to create a site structure similar to that found on the previous site, you would probably see a return to those traffic levels (or close) fairly quickly. Another method might be to re-institute the previous site by reloading the site map on the old domain (there are tools for this). This would permit you to use the old site until you could get a proper site structure set up for the new one.

You don't have to move back to the previous website permanently, but it wouldn't be a bad idea until to have sorted out what you want to do with the new site moving forward. A properly-executed 301 redirect should cost you between 1-3% of your overall link juice.

Hope this helps a bit.

Rob

Hi Calum,

Going the canonical route is typically meant as a short-term solution when a site is under maintenance - it normally isn't meant to be a long-term fix.

From what I understand, you have a number of localized landing pages for your services set up and they are bringing in traffic to your main page.

You don't want to redirect or create tags back to your home page from all of your local pages as this will create penalties with Google. Your best bet might be to incorporate your local pages into your site structure in a way that would permit them to be easily crawled (and therefore easy to access) rather than redirecting all traffic to your home page.

This is what I think you might be doing when you say "we have everything pointing back to our main URL" - it would be best to create new pages for redirects if this is indeed what you are doing.

Maybe give me some more information on the previous duplicate content, where you started and where you are now and I can create a more specific answer for you.

Rob