Large Ecommerce Website with Multiple Domains

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  • SEO
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I am an in-house SEO and PPC specialist at a large ecommerce web store. Two years ago, we acquired one of our competitors. They had almost exactly the same product line on their website as we do, including similar or duplicate content.

We kept both websites, and so far have been experiencing a decrease in organic traffic. My initial conclusion is that we are being penalized for having duplicate content on our two websites, but when I search Google to see what competitors are beating us in the rankings, they have the same duplicate content as well! This does not appear to be uncommon for our industry; everyone seems to copy/paste the manufacturer's content.

Add to that, we are testing a new third website that is much more SEO friendly and easier for us to use, but at the moment still contains the duplicate content. We are now currently managing three websites and making revenue from each, but eventually the new website will replace one of the old ones.

Management is concerned that if we eliminate both old websites, we will be losing potential revenue from those websites. Assuming that we 301 redirect ALL traffic from both old websites to the new website, is this concern valid? Can we significantly lose revenue by reducing our web presence to the single website? Is this true even if the websites are branded differently? Lastly, why might we be losing a significant amount of organic traffic if our competitors use the same content as we do?
#domains #duplicate content #ecommerce #ecommerce website #large #multiple #multiple domains #website
  • Profile picture of the author momoneyman
    This is confusing.

    So your ranking product pages and everyone in your niche is basically copy-pasting the manufacturer info.

    Yet they are outranking you.....

    Then you decided to do the same thing on not 1 but 2 more websites and the results were the same -- mediocore rankings.

    How do you know you are suffering in rankings due to solely duplicate content? If your competitors are doing the same, how do you know they dont have better incoming links? Have you analyzed their backlink portfolio?

    If you 301 the two domains to the main domain, well, your gonna lose the traffic from the organic SERP listings because the two 301'd sites will eventually drop out.

    Why woudn't you just create fresh content on one of the sites rather than copy-pasting everything again.

    P.S. I really need to do seo client consulting if this is industry standard lol
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    • Profile picture of the author Brennan Mack
      Originally Posted by momoneyman View Post

      Why woudn't you just create fresh content on one of the sites rather than copy-pasting everything again.
      This was exactly my recommendation to management, and I guess my question could be better phrased as: Should we keep two websites and write unique content for each, or condense our webstore to one site?
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO Power
    Are you hosting all three websites on the same web host? If yes, that's likely the culprit. Google probably thinks you are trying to manipulate the algorithm and spam the results by building similar sites all targeting similar keywords.
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  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    Amazon owns a gazillion websites and domains....and peddles the same crapola.
    Just like wikipedia, ebay, etc. Ever been to ebaymotors.com?

    Nobody in the real word that has large sites like that gives a hoot about same IP.
    Like google does not know ebay owns ebaymotors.com? Amazon does not own
    zappos? (Newsflash: They sell much the same stuff on amazon as they do on zappos)

    Amazon does not put all their sites on one.
    Ebay for the most part, does.

    Does not matter, either way.

    For the average Joe, I would never decrease my web footprint.

    Paul
    Signature

    If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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    • Profile picture of the author paulch65
      Hi,

      I wouldn't worry about IP issues I think that's more vital if you interlink the two sites.

      Yes duplicate content hurts. Have you got thousands of products where you just CSV upload manufacturer's descriptions?

      You really need to be doing unique content --- and I mean 700-1000 words, at least for category pages and important products, as well as creating blog posts to give you more options to use anchor text.

      You may have an authority issue too. If you've got shit backlinks etc. May I ask what PageRank the two sites have.

      Canning the sites for SEO problems seems untenable, at least for the issues you've got.

      PM the details and I'll have a look at it.

      1. keywords (location too). Just a few will do --- pages you want to rank for it.
      2. Aforementioned competitors.

      Cheers

      Paul.

      We're in the UK.
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      • Profile picture of the author Brennan Mack
        Originally Posted by paulch65 View Post

        Yes duplicate content hurts. Have you got thousands of products where you just CSV upload manufacturer's descriptions?

        You really need to be doing unique content --- and I mean 700-1000 words, at least for category pages and important products, as well as creating blog posts to give you more options to use anchor text.

        You may have an authority issue too. If you've got shit backlinks etc. May I ask what PageRank the two sites have.

        Canning the sites for SEO problems seems untenable, at least for the issues you've got.
        This leads me to another question that I've been pondering. If we write unique content for our categories and our major products, would we still be suffering as much of a penalty for the, say, 1500-2000 products with duplicate content? The way I understand it, Google penalizes the site as a whole for large content duplication. Is that correct?

        In terms of links, I'm sure we have some bad ones that I need to drudge through and disavow. Our company website is PR 5 and the one we acquired is PR 4.
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        • Profile picture of the author paulgl
          Originally Posted by Brennan Mack View Post

          This leads me to another question that I've been pondering. If we write unique content for our categories and our major products, would we still be suffering as much of a penalty for the, say, 1500-2000 products with duplicate content? The way I understand it, Google penalizes the site as a whole for large content duplication. Is that correct?

          In terms of links, I'm sure we have some bad ones that I need to drudge through and disavow. Our company website is PR 5 and the one we acquired is PR 4.
          And while you're at it, toss "SEO specialist."

          You have repeated so much BS, it's amazing.

          Paul
          Signature

          If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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