Hi guys,
One of my competitors has a few domains that point to 1 site.
Site A - is the actual site
Site B - has the same front page as Site A but seems to point all pages to site A.
Now both appear higher than me in the search engine results :S
Is this fine to do - I’m assuming he has registered a few domains that redirect to the one main site and they have left the front page to look similar.
Kind Regards,
GG
Probably an oversight by Google, report it and they might nerf it or the dup content filter might pick it up eventually.
correct - the site redirects to it. But both come up on search listings for the same keyword.
Are you sure that he hasn’t just got two domain names, one the site is actually hosted on and one that redirects to the site?
Its fine to do (in terms of not being black hat), but if the search engines aren’t picking up the duplicate content issue, then its a little worrying.
The good side of this is that they are diluting their back-link profile, by spreading out the backlink distribution to many sites that point to one, instead of having the one site getting all of the 1st-order value.
yes, IMHO I believe that this is perfectly ok but I do not think it increases ranking in search engines. Could be wrong tho.
Just makes me wonder how both can rank so high… I mean i might as well register domains and 301 redirect to the main domain right?
I don’t really want to reveal why I think they did that but some hints is that they have tagged their URL structure properly to avoid duplicate content issue.
Nothing “slips by” Google. It’s an algorithm.
Since you didn’t provide the sites for us to investigate, my guess is that the sites probably differ in their SEO methods and one is acting as a doorway page.
Hope that helped!
The sites in question are (Site A) www. lapto_pl_cd.com.au (remove the _ underscores) and the other one in is (Site B) www. lapto_plcd_sc_reen.com.au
See how site B directs straight to site B. The thing is - site A appears on search results all the time as well as site B depending on search terms.
Kind Regards,
GG
Any time you introduce duplicate content (ie. by copying your homepage and having it live on a different domain) you run the risk of Google filtering out one of your domains from their index. If you leave it up to them, Google might filter out your main domain or the domain you really want to show up in search. So that wouldn’t be a good result.
Additionally both domains might attract a share of backlinks, rather than a single domain getting all of those backlinks. So you would be splitting the value of your backlinks between two domains, meaning each of them don’t end up ranking as well as a single domain would if it had all of that consolidated value.
If you want to go down the path of having multiple domains for your site/business, then you could instead create sites under each domain that are different in some way. Maybe one domain per product? But instead of just copying the product info from your main site, create a site under that product domain that has additional useful information, maybe product reviews, customer reviews, extra photos or information about that product etc.
You’ll end up with lots of separate sites under different domains, that can compete in search results for very specific (long-tail) searches, but are all unique rather than just an exact copy of your main site.
What do mean ‘not a good long term stategy’ & is this method illegal? If so - everyone should do the same thing right?
It seems like just a copy of the homepage is on the other domain (Site A). And that site has only the homepage indexed in Google.
So for the head terms he ranks well because the domain name is an exact match.
It’s not cheating, but it’s not a good long-term strategy.