Dupicated Site Issues?
-
We are launching a new site for the Australian market and the URL will just be siteAU.com.
Currently the tech team (before we came on board) has it setup with almost exactly the same content (including the site css/nav/structure etc). Some product page content is slightly different, and category pages have different product orders, plus there are location pages that are specific to AU, but otherwise it's the same.
The original site: site.ca has been around for 6+ years, with several thousand pages and solid organic ranking (though the last few months have dropped )
Will the new AU site create issues for the original domain? We also have siteUSA.com which follows the same logic and has been live for a while.
-
if you want to rank competitively in the US and AU then I strongly recommend local domains.
In my experience, subfolders on a single domain are less effective then local domains. The above solution can work and you are at an advantage that your CA site is established and is the "parent" site.
It is more work to maintain separate domains, but in my experience of managing .com sites, we have always faced a challenge because despite the target setting in WMT, Google still struggles to rank the UK site in the UK over the US site in many instances because it is on a .com and because there is a US version of the site.
-
Could work well. We would have some additional content challenges, but still consolidated. e.g. now on the same domain we would have thousands of more pages for the city-specific areas. But we would have those anyway on separate domains. My question though is if we would face any more local ranking challenges. e.g. within canada we may already rank for 'plumbing service' for example. If everything is consolidated, we wouldn't rank 2X for the same search term, but if on different domains, we could - in the respective countries. Local modifiers like City Plumbing Service could still work.
-
To me this seems like the optimal solution. With this setup you are not only eliminating the possible duplicate content issues, but you still have information for each region on the site.
Or you could use your country specific domains as landing pages, and optimize them for their home country while still hosting the majority of your content on your main domain.
-
Thanks for the input. One alternative we are pondering is keeping everything on the primary domain with sections for the countries we serve. So primary is Canada then we also serve AU and USA. There may be some branding issues, along with technical challenges with our order processing, but it would probably allow us to better control content.
Thoughts on this?
-
If you set the targeting in Webmaster Tools to AU only and the others to their corresponding markets then you are unlikely to face any duplicate content penalties.
Additional measures you need to consider are:
Focus the majority of link building and PR to respective markets i.e. try and get a higher ratio of links from local sites
Put local physical addresses on each site e.g. on the AU site have an address in Australia.Generally speaking, you are still going to have some issues with your non AU sites outranking your AU site on Google AU, as do sites in the UK, but if you take the measures above then you are sending a strong signal to the search engines that you are not trying to spam them.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Paid Links on Credible Sites
Hi people. I'm wondering, what would be the effects of having a paid link on a credible site. The site would feature a brand page about my site and link to it. The site has a good domain authority and they are credible with quality content. Ultimately though the link would be paid. Would Google treat this negatively? Or would they pick up on it at all? Thanks, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Depth of Links on Ecommerce Site
Hi, In my sitemap, I have the preferred entrance pages and URL's of categories and subcategories. But I would like to know more about how Googlebot and other spiders see a site - e.g. - what is classed as a deep link? I am using Screaming Frog SEO spider, and it has a metric called level on it - and this represents how deep or how many clicks away this content is.. but I don't know if that is how Googlebot would see it - From what Screaming Frog SEO spider software says, each move horizontally across from Navigation is another level which visually doesnt make sense to me? Also, in my sitemap, I list the URL's of all the products, there are no levels within the sitemap. Should I be concerned about this? Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
If I had an issue with a friendly URL module and I lost all my rankings. Will they return now that issue is resolved next time I'm crawled by google?
I have 'magic seo urls' installed on my zencart site. Except for some reason no one can explain why or how the files were disabled. So my static links went back to dynamic (index.php?**********) etc. The issue was resolved with the module except in that time google must have crawled my site and I lost all my rankings. I'm nowher to be found in the top 50. Did this really cause such an extravagant SEO issue as my web developers told me? Can I expect my rankings to return next time my site is crawled by google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pete790 -
Duplicate content issue
Hi I installed a wiki and a forum to subdomains of one of my sites. The crawl report shows me duplicate content on the forum and on wiki. This will hurt the main site? Or the root domain? the site by the way is clean absolutely from errors. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Seo for Q&A site
Hi, I am working on a newly launched Q&A site. We have very few questions and users right now and very very low seo traffic. In order to increase the number of users and seo traffic we intend to create a number of pages containing potential questions. Each page would have the following structure: Question. Ex: "What are the top wholesale suppliers of coffee in China?" Some content. Ex: Are you looking for wholesale suppliers of coffee in China? Post your question here? Question form Some additional content So there would be a page for wholesale suppliers of coffee for every country. We would publish the pages gradually and the content would be unique but yet similar (ex: only the Country changes). What do you think about this approach? Is it a good idea or can it be dangerous? We don't want to incur in any kind of penalization, we just want to give the possibility to people who are looking for specific information to find us and be able to post the request on our website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ypsilon0 -
Building a mobile site.
We are building a mobile site that will be launching in another month. I’m concerned that the mobile site will start catabolizing our traditional rankings. Is there a way to keep this from happening? Should we utilize the cross domain canonical tag and point back to the traditional site URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Team0