I have a client who has presented the following situation:
A parent company works with two distributors of their products. Both distributors want a new website developed. They both sell the same product, so will want to share content and basic page layouts. For example, product listings will be same across both sites, as will copy about the products they provide.
My concerns here are with SEO and duplicate content. Google defines duplicate content as:
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content
within or across domains that either completely match other content or
are appreciably similar.
It seems that in this case, where two distributors are selling the same product, each having a website that duplicates content, is legitimate. But, I have a feeling either site could get penalised. So perhaps having two sites would be too damaging.
Any thoughts on this much appreciated.
Thanks
If it can't be helped, it's fine. Ideally you would want to make unique descriptions and content.
As recent as a couple months back, I had a staging site that didn't have the noindex tag on it by mistake. The staging site and the actual site were both ranking well for keywords.
While you are probably fine, you should still look into allotting time for content development.
Related
We've been working successfully with the AdWords API (Version: 201708 -
Google Ads Python Client Library) for a good while building internal reports for our application. Until, that is, we hit placements…
I define placements as anywhere an AdWords ad is shown. The placement might be a domain, page, ad unit, app you name it! Placements are a very broad definition.
For our app to work for placements we need to join API spend data with activity on our website.
To do this we are running AdWords API reports and then collecting session data using AdWords ValueTrack parameters.
The ValueTrack parameters are easy enough, as there seems to be only 1 option: {placement}.
However, it's on the API where things get interesting, the API has numerous options for getting placement data. For example:
https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/reference/v201708/AdGroupCriterionService.MobileApplication
https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/reports/url-performance-report
https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/reports/placement-performance-report#criteria
https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/reports/automatic-placements-performance-report#domain
https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/reference/v201708/AdGroupCriterionService
After spending some time going back and forth on the various options, and burning lots of dev time, we've come to the conclusion that there must be some best practice advice out there for joining placement data from the API and ValueTrack. One that works for all types of placements, including:
Websites
Apps
AdSense
Blogspot
AMP
An example of where we are running into a matching problem is "10060.android.com.nytimes.android.adsenseformobileapps.com"... this is a placement we see coming in from ValueTrack but has no match in any of our spend reports. (In fact there are many many adsenseformobileapps.com traffic sources for which there are no spend items).
Also seeing strings like "mobileapp::2-com.mobilesrepublic.appy". These show up on our spend side but only appear in our ValueTrack around 10% of the time. Some match. The vast majority don't.
A definitive workflow on this would be SO useful for ourselves and no doubt other users…
Thanks!
According to https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/guides/valuetrack-mapping
the incoming ValueTrack placement should map to the following report fields:
PlacementPerformanceReport.Criteria
CriteriaPerformanceReport.Criteria
AutomaticPlacementsPerformanceReport.DisplayName
In addition to this I have also found this report useful:
UrlPlacementPerformanceReport.Domain and .Url
But I have found it is not so clear in practice. For one thing each of these reports return a slightly different subset of results..and none of these subsets exactly match the ValueTrack data set.
Here are the exceptions I have found:
subdomains
ValueTrack placements have urls with www on them... some of the time. None of the other reports do, so you will either have to strip www from ValueTrack or add www to your report data in order to match them. But be careful, other subdomains are preserved (like edition.cnn.com) and not all urls have a subdomain, so you can't just strip all the subdomains from Valuetrack and you can't just add www to all the urls in the reports. What I have found actually matches the best is the url field from the UrlPlacementPerformanceReport... but for this field you just need to strip everything after the / to get a best case matching subset. To use the other reports you would need to strip all the subdomain information from ValueTrack and sum the totals from those records. This means you would lose potentially useful data such as differences between espn.com, scores.espn.com, insider.espn.com and games.espn.com. Using the UrlPlacementPerformanceReport.url is the only way to preserve that info.
mobileapp::
ValueTrack reports on mobileapp:: placements. Many of the reports return these values too but I have found that each report just gives a subset of the whole. In particular the CriteriaPerformanceReport.Criteria report gives you many mobileapp:: values that none of the other reports do, but the other reports give you at least a few values that the CriteriaPerformanceReport doesn't. To be complete you would have to take a Union of the mobileapps: returned by the criteria performance report and another report such as the UrlPlacementPerformanceReport.url.
anonymous.google
ValueTrack provides sudomains to anonymous.google that look like a8122ac7e5da8e49.anonymous.google. If you want to match this information to your spend the only report that has this detail is UrlPlacementPerformanceReport.url.
adsenseformobileapps.com
ValueTrack provides detailed domains such as 1.iphone.com.localtvllc.fox2.adsenseformobileapps.com. None of the adwords reports can match this. The best you can get is a single summation record for the entire adsenseformobileapps.com group.
On my site I have items that can be in few or more categories.
Links to one item may look like (for example):
example.com/category_id_1/item_id_1
example.com/category_id_67/item_id_1
example.com/category_id_106/item_id_1
So I dont understand do I need to set all links for one item in sitemap.xml or just certain one? If only one - which one?
Which way would be more correct according to SEO optimization?
If all the three URLs serves same content it will create some duplicate content issues.
You didn't mention whether you are using a dedicated product URL or not. Better approach to use product URLs will be something like,
yourdomain.com/products/xyx-product
I have sort of a problem how to use Google Analytics properly with Boostrap.
My page has 3 level deep subpages and the last subpage has it's own subdomain. In GA I see I can use max. 50 tracking codes within one service. What if I need more than that?
You are limited to 50 properties not 50 pages. Each property can track many pages and (up to 10 million hits a month for the free version) and events.
Typically you would use the same property code on all pages on the same site so you can see all that data together (though with option to drill down).
You would only use a new property code for a new site (though your subdomain might qualify for that if you want to track it separately).
So the two questions you want to ask yourself are:
Do you want to be able to report on two pages together? E.g. To see that your site gets 10,000 hits and 20% are for this page and 5% are for that page. Or people start at this page and then go to that page and then on to this page. If so it should be the same analytics property.
Do different people need to see these page stats? And is it a problem if they do? If so put as a separate property so you can permission separately.
It sounds like these are part of the same site so I'd be veering towards tracking them together on same property.
On a different note you should set one page as the main version (with a rel canonical tag) and redirect other version to that page to avoid confusing search engines thinking you have duplicated content. Do you have a reason for having the same content on two different addresses? It can cause SEO and other problems.
We're about to embark on a restructuring of our Website, and we will be separating some of our customers into different groups.
Currently all of our customers visit our homepage: www.example.com
What we are going to be doing is sending customers to specific landing pages depending on marketing segmentation.
For instance, people who we know are more likely to book a hotel might go to www.example.com/hotels, whilst people who like cars will go to www.example.com/cars.
The content might be ever so slightly different (a banner or parameter might change) but the vast majority of text (copy, layout) will stay the same.
Firstly, are Canonical Tags appropriate to use in this case to direct any Google juice back to www.example.com?
Secondly, since we will be marketing to specific groups, we will not want these pages to be indexed by Google, nor for them to appear in search rankings. With this in mind, are Canonical Tags still the correct tag to be using? That is, do Canonical Tags pass on the Google Juice to the canonical page, meaning the referrer page is not indexed?
If the core content of all those pages is the same then I think using the canonical tag will work. If Google accepts the canonicalness of the pages then it will always send people to the page you specify.
What do you mean by "sending customers to specific landing pages depending on marketing segmentation"? How is that implemented?
If all that changes is adverts then why not use the one page and dynamically insert the adverts that suit the visitor?
Seems that if you don't want the specific landing pages indexed by Google, or appearing in the search rankings, then the pages wouldn't have any 'Google juice' to consolidate. In that case, canonical tags won't hurt, but I don't think they'll have any effect.
To keep the landing pages from being indexed, you could use robots.txt, as well as the robots meta tag.
I have a client who over the years has managed to get their product to the top of Google for many different search terms. They're adamant that the new site shouldn't have a detrimental effect to their google ranking.
The site will be replacing the site that is on there current domain, as well as going up on to 5 further domains.
Will any of this lose the client there current ranking on google?
Google re-ranks the sites it has regularly. If the site changes, the ranking very well could... if more or fewer people link to it or if the terms on the site (the content) is different.
The effect might be good or bad, but uploading different content isn't going to make their rank go away overnight or anything like that.
Page Rank is most about incoming links. So if the incoming links won't be broken page rank will not be affected that much.
Though, overall ranking is not just Page Rank, so... further discussion is needed
if they retain current link structure they should be fine