I'm working on a website which currently has two different domains pointing at it:
example1.com
example2.com
I have read that serving identical content to multiple domains can harm rankings.
The website being served is largely the same with the exception of item listings (think of an e-commerce site) and a few other minor tweaks (title, description, keywords, etc). Depending on the domain used it will adapt to serve different items.
Does this resolve the issue of serving duplicated content across multiple domains thus not harming the rankings?
Or would I be better to 301 redirect to a single domain and go from there?
If both your URLs show the same styled product listing then it will definitely affect the search engine result. Give a different look to both your websites in terms of displaying product or changing navigation menu. Put a slightly different image and add different descriptions to display your product.
If you run a website with same content and design on two different domains even with modified title, description and keywords, it is bad SEO practice and your website will be penalized by search engines.
Best option would be making a new website design with original content for the second domain and optimize it. Other wise you can make a 301 redirect for pointing domain 2 to the domain 1, this will not harm you nor help you!
I have also seen multiple domains having same website, content, title and description.. But to my surprise that domain is ranking well.. Crazy search engines!
Related
I am working on the SEO optimization of a multistore. For example I have in the same language and same currency website:
www.test.com
subdomain.test.com
Why like that? Because main is for wholesales customers and subdomain for retail customers.
We have too much products so it's impossible to make different text for shared products.
So we had to set the product for both stores. So the duplication is almost 100% (of course the menu and some information around product is a little bit different but the product is the same) For us and also for Google is main www.test.com.
What is the best in this case to get from google the best ratio? I'm wondering if our main website isn't a little bit go down cos of duplication on subdomain.
I was thinking about setting subdomain to noindex,nofollow and let Google index only main website.
Or if this isn't problem for Google I can let like now but I'm not sure.
You can use canonical tag on the subdomain pages. Canonical Tag tells search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs. Following is the syntax of canonical tag:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.test.com"/>
We've a multiregion with multilanguage ecommerce site. Each country site has two or more languages based on the country. For example, Our Brazilian site has 2 languages but our US site has 6 different languages.
We're using subdomain structure for our URLs. Ex: http://us.site.com/en, http://us.site.com/es
Now we're closing down one of our country. Which has the biggest index in our country list. But we don't know what to do before closing it. What do you guys suggest before loose organics or get banned?
Here is our scenarios:
Redirect all the traffic one of our other country
Completely close down the site and show "not found" all the indexed pages
Redirect all the indexed pages to our "Select your country" landing page
Thank you
Possibly create a landing page providing options to browse another language page? After all user experience is one of the most important factors. Will redirecting the traffic with a 301 will land users onto a page in a language they might not be able to understand. I would keep some of these points in mind.
i have 3 domains that are multilanguage and all hosted in the same servers/databases
for example: thanks.com/en , gracias.com/es and danke.com/de
so in terms of text content there is no duplicate content, since each text is properly translated.
the problem i am facing is with images.
for example:
a_cow.jpg is the same for all domains and will be loading at thanks.com/a_cow.jpg , gracias.com/a_cow.jpg and danke.com/a_cow.jpg
my question is if this will be counted as duplicated content by search engines, since the same image can be accessed from multiple domains.
should i force them to load all in one domain? for example, in gracias.com load the image with thanks.com / a_cow.jpg
i can do that in htaccess but i am wondering if i should do it or not, and what are the pros and cons.
thanks in advance
my question is if this will be counted as duplicated content by search engines, since the same image can be accessed from multiple domains.
It will count as duplicate image, but not duplicate content as it is typically understood in SEO. It is only an issue if you are trying to get traffic from those images. Since they have different URLs, they will be considered as different images in competition for the same traffic, although they are the same.
should i force them to load all in one domain? for example, in gracias.com load the image with thanks.com / a_cow.jpg
Not if you don't care about getting traffic from these images. Otherwise, it would help yes.
but on the other hand, the other 2 domains will load images from a external domain.
That is not an issue. Keep in mind that if you load images from one domain only, it is that domain that will get the traffic, not the others.
I have a client who has brought a truck load of domains he wants me to redirect to his site.
A few of them are the same name with different top level domains (mysite.com, mysite.co.uk etc etc) but a lot of them are keyword related (mylocation-businessType.com etc etc).
I am wondering if either of these will be negative for SEO. I am thinking the top level domain changes will be fine, and expected by google, but the keywords might be views as a bit hacky?
What are the good people of stackoverflow's view on this?
If they are redirected properly then they'll have no effect at all. The only advantage will be if the name makes sense and a user might type it in. eg. identical names with and without hyphens.
For this situation all of the other answers are correct, you won't get any benefits in Pagerank, etc. and it wouldn't be useful except to pickup direct traffic to your domain names that you are then redirecting.
How would it affect your SEO though? That's a little trickier. Two ways of looking at it:
1.) Competitors could do this to you and it'd be completely out of your control. If redirecting a bunch of domains did any real harm to rankings it'd be a great way to do negative SEO, or "Google Bowling," and could be used to take down a site's rankings. That isn't the case though, so it probably wouldn't have too much of a negative effect.
UNLESS
2.) The nameservers for your redirected domains match the nameservers for your main domain. Pointing all domains to the same set of nameservers will help show that all domains are under the control of the same webmaster.
Even if you are using different nameservers and using 301 redirects as recommended, if the server with your redirects comes back to (at least) the same Class C IP address as your main site's server, a search engine would still be able to tie you together as likely being run by the same owner.
Either of these setups can identify you as the source of the redirects and devalue the ranking ability of your main site since there is a much higher likelihood the redirects are coming from you.
winwaed is correct. If you're doing a proper 301 redirect, the other domains are only valuable if people directly type them in. They won't rank, won't get any link juice, and won't get any inbound links. If you do seed inbound links, google will treat them as if they point to the target of your 301 redirect. It's a waste of time to just directly do that for SEO purposes.
The way to use each of those domains for SEO would be to build a bit of unique content on each one, get some inbound links, and then link out to your target page. Not really worth doing unless you really spend a lot of time at it, and google still tends to penalize obvious gaming of the system like that.
They won't contribute toward ranking, however keyword domains do get some amount of advantage for those terms. So, the way to use them is to build sites on all of them and funnel traffic to the main site.
Of course, they can also be used for extra backlinks, but you really want different C class IP addresses from the servers. For that reason you might want to go with SEO hosting.
Matt Cutts from Google explained it in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA
and here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a70ygsHgvMw
He also said if he was doing this, he would redirect each of sites to the target sites' different important pages. If the redirected domains had pageranks before, they will still flow pagerank (not exactly but a lower pagerank).
We have a family of sites (about games) with shared content. Each site has its own top level domain, and most content has a "home" domain, but all content is accessible on each domain. This allows a user who is logged in on, for example, the board game site, to page through their new subscribed content and see pages about RPGs or video games (content that is based in another of our domains) without having to jump to another domain.
I am concerned that this duplicate content will be used to penalize us in search engine rankings. Canonical links do not work across domains. Google recommends using 301 redirects to force all users to a single domain for a particular page, but we do not want to do that because we don't want to force users off their preferred domain. In addition, we have other content that genuinely belongs to multiple domains--lists that might include games from multiple domains,for example.
How can we continue to show our content in this way, without being penalized for having duplicate content across domains?
Have a read of this article, Google does support cross domain canonical. So just point it to the single source of truth!
http://searchengineland.com/google-supports-cross-domain-canonical-tag-32044