Need advice for Site Layout to avoid Duplicate Content/Maximise SEO benefits for certain pages

Marketing
1

Im new to SEO strategies and how it all ties together.

Im having trouble with how i should layout my site.

Id like to have 2 subdomains as children of my top level domain. And Product pages as children of each subdomain.

My goal is to focus ranking my subdomains. Not my top level domain. If the top level domain benefits from my subdomain rankings, then great. If not, then it doesnt matter.(i dont yet understand how that works). Just the subdomains count here.

In its simplest form it would look something like this:

IDEAL LAYOUT

The subdomains are linking to the product pages (but the product pages are NOT subdomain childrenā€¦the arrows denote links).

Notice that ā€œus-uk-product1ā€ and ā€œus-uk-product2ā€ pages (blue and green) would benefit from visitors from both the ā€œusā€ AND ā€œukā€ subdomains. That would increase their click thru rate right?

Problem is, i cant make them children of either subdomain in that structure (that im aware of). Cos if i made them children of ā€œusā€ subdomainā€¦if ā€œukā€ visitors go to those product pages, their URL will change from uk.products.com to US.products.com/product. And vice versa.

Nor can i make the product pages children of the top level domain. Same problem. us.products.com/uk.products.com would change to products.com/product when a product page is visited.(subdomain keyword missing).

Final problem with it is that i want to add a ā€œVisitā€ button to the product page, which takes them off my site to the merchant site, and a ā€œBackā€ button to take them back to the subdomain they came from (the buttons sit next to eachother). I dont want to rely on the Navbar to do this. But since the product pages are not children of either subdomain, how could i detect which subdomain they came from and send them back there onclick ā€œbackā€ if this structure WAS possible?

So if that structure isnt possible (which i really hope it isā€¦i just dont know enough) then i move onto what i call the Duplicate Layout:

DUPLICATE LAYOUT

So now we see that each subdomain has a copy of each product page. That solves the ā€œbackā€ button issue. But now the potential click thru rate of ā€œus-uk-product1ā€ and ā€œus-uk-product2ā€ pages have been cut in half, which is not good. And the number of pages on my site will now increase considerably, doubling the amount of product pages required. Also, this will be considered duplicate content right?

By the way, in this duplicate structure, do the subdomains now benefit from the visits to the product pages because they are direct children of the subdomains? Or does that not count for anything, and instead, is it just a matter of the product pages ā€œlinking backā€ to the subdomains that help the subdomains benefit from product page visits?

And finally i thought of an ā€œIframe Layoutā€:
(sorry i put a space after https on this url. New users can only post 2 links)

https://bubbl.us/?s=7531242#!Mzc5NTQ3OC83NTMxMjQyL2E2MTNhNGZiMjU5ZDRhZWY3Zjk1MTIwOGRhZjA3MjYz?X

In this Layout i get rid of the duplicate content issue (i think) but now the original product pages are children of the top level domain. This also solves the click thru rate issue i think because from what ive read all benefits will be sent from the iframe contents on the subdomain product pages, back to its original source. But now this is only helping my top level domain rank because the original source pages are children of it. And the subdomains dont benefit at all.(unless im completely wrong about the parent/direct children beneficial relationshipā€¦and its only internal links that count for passing benefits).

So if anyone can understand what im trying to achieve (even if my noob thinking/explanation is completely wrong) ā€¦could i get some help/advice please?

2

I would have to say that you should keep them on the same domain, unless you have a legitimate reason for not doing soā€¦for instance, my blog is hosted elsewhere, so I had to put it on a separate domain. If I was hosting it, I would have it set as domain.com/blog/ instead of blog.domain.com.

Keep in mind that Google sees subdomains as a completely different domain and you will need to doubly invest to get your SEO going. That is why Wordpress.com users have subdomains for their sites, but Wordpressā€™ SEO is not transferred to those users.

Joshua

Post edited by cpradio: remove self-promotion

3

Duplicate content: check for duplicate content in Google Webmaster tools, via the site: search command or via site crawling software. Duplicate content issues can be solved via a 301-redirect, the rel=ā€canonicalā€ tag, meta robots tag, URL rewriting or Google Webmaster Tools. Read more: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/general/how-to-solve-duplicate-content/

This quote comes from https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/a-web-designers-seo-checklist-including-portable-formats--webdesign-10740

4

If you think yr site have problem with duplicate content, must to spin it before.

5

I donā€™t see how that could benefit a product page.

It might mitigate a duplicate content issue, but it seems to me that it would eliminate hope of getting any conversions on the spun page.

In any case, that is not what the discussion is about. The question is about how to structure the site.

4 Likes
6

Welcome to the forums, @xxguestxx.

In search results, it is the page which is determined to have thhe content that best matches a search request which is returned in the search results. In other words, domains or sub-domains donā€™t ā€œrankā€, as such; each page is considered upon its merits, irrespective of the domain.

You might find it helpful to read Googleā€™s advice about multi-regional sites:

2 Likes
7

If you had a structure like:

example.com/index.html
&
example.com/subfolder/page.html

when page.html gets visited, does index.html receive benefits in anyway?

Or would index.html only receive benefits if theres a link on page.html pointing to index.html? (and vice versa).

8

I donā€™t know what you mean by ā€œbenefitsā€

And why would one page being visited have anything to do with any other page (other than crawlers / visitors following links) ?

If you are thinking in terms of some sort of ā€œSite Rankā€, there is no such thing. Please reread TechnoBearā€™s post.

If you are wondering if there are any SEO differences between subdomains and subdirectories:

1 Like
9

Ive read different bits n pieces over the past week or so that talk about benefits being passed around the site in some form or another. Im still trying to get my head around it.

I cant remember any specific posts ive read, theres been so many, but i just did a quick search now and found something similar to the things ive read. Quote:

ā€œIn terms of SEO considerations, pages set up in a subfolder-like structure will leverage the ā€˜powerā€™ of the main domain itself and would receive a trickle-down effect from the inbound links received from the domain itself.ā€

What does that mean exactly?

I can see that it has something to do with the main domain (index.html in prev example) linking to the subfolder page (page.html) , giving the subfolder page some kind of ā€˜powerā€™ or ā€˜benefitā€™.

Why is that? Is it purely because of the link from main domain to subfolder page?

Or just because the subfolder is a child of the main domain? Or both?

10

It sounds like that is about what was called ā€œlink juiceā€.

Many years ago there was something called ā€œPage Rankā€ (as in Larry Page, not web page) and Google periodically published Page Rank data for web pages.

The theory was that a web pages PR was divided up so as to pass a portion of its ā€œlink juiceā€ to web pages that it had links to.

For a completely made up example meant only to give the idea, if a web page had a stand-alone PR of 2, but a thousand pages that had PR 6 linked to the page, that pages PR would get bumped up to PR3

The belief was that higher PR pages showed earlier in the SERPs.

Because of this belief many started to link drop in as many places as they could in hopes of manipulating Google results - and sadly, often at the expense of creating valuable page content.

Google has long since said that web sites should not be concerned with PR, they have stopped publishing PR data, and the ā€œlink:ā€ search modifier is useless.

Just the same, despite what Google itself says (that PR is one of over 200 ā€œsignalsā€ used to determine page position in the SERPs) many SEOers consider PR ā€œlink juiceā€ to be important and many still practice link dropping in hopes of manipulating Google.

1 Like
11

Ok thanks.

I think im going to go with the IFRAME LAYOUT from my first post.

The factors im trying to understand in that case are ā€œPage Viewsā€ and ā€œClickthrough Rateā€.

No doubt the parent document of the Iframe will get a +1 Page View when it is displayed.

But will the Source Page inside the Iframe get a +1 Page View as well?

Also, i imagine that a page gets a +1 to its Clickthrough Rate when a visitor travels from an external link, to that page.

But how about when a visitor travels from an Internal link to that page? Does that add +1 CTR to that page as well?

12

I presume when you refer to Page View and CTR that you are thinking of this in terms of advertising on the site? Otherwise, I donā€™t quite understand your issue.

13

No not really for advertising. More so for ā€¦i dont know what it would be calledā€¦ā€œPage Popularity?ā€ in Googles eyes?

I just think surely Google takes into consideration the amount of views and click throughs a page getsā€¦to determine whether its popular or notā€¦therefore pushing that page higher up in the search results.

Would those things count for anything?

14

There is an awful lot written about SEO, and much of it is either 'way out of date or sheer speculation. My advice would be to forget about trying to create some kind of artificial ā€œbenefitā€ for your site, and concentrate on building it to best serve human visitors. After all, thatā€™s your target audience, not some search engine bot, right?

I recommend watching these two short videos to give you a better feel for how Google search works:

1 Like
15

I think as long as using iframes will be beneficial to site visitors and it makes things easier for you, they should be OK.

But in terms of SEO they may hurt.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34445

Google supports frames and iframes to the extent that it can. Frames can cause problems for search engines because they donā€™t correspond to the conceptual model of the web. In this model, one page displays only one URL. Pages that use frames or iframes display several URLs (one for each frame) within a single page. Google tries to associate framed content with the page containing the frames, but we donā€™t guarantee that we will.

3 Likes
16

Thanks for the vids.

They confirmed for me that im on the right track. Even without knowing how Search works, i have been implementing pretty much everthing described in the vids.

I truly am trying to build it to best serve human visitors. If i dont, i know a high bounce rate will be waiting for me and will destroy everything ive worked for.

At the same time i want to structure it to optimize its potential to rank as high as possible. Im confident that my Content will be both User friendly and SEO friendly. But when it comes to things like Page Rank, Link Juice, Page Viewsā€¦things that are not content relatedā€¦i have very little understanding, but really want to know how to optimize those things before i put my site online.

17

Yes. I think iframes will be beneficial in my case because it eliminates the possibility of duplicate content. Each of my subdomains will contain multiple instances of the same page.

From a site visitor point of view it will make no difference whether the content is viewed from an iframe or not. Either way they would have been served the exact same page. Just makes it easier for me to eliminate duplicate content.

I just wonder if, when an iframe is displayed, the source page inside the iframe will get a +1 to its page viewā€¦or only the parent page/document.

18

Start with Googleā€™s ā€œSearch Engine Optimization Starter Guideā€, which will tell you the most important things you need to do.

While PageRank does still exist, and is still used by Google, it is now very much an internal Google algorithm. Google has long since ceased to issue regular public updates, because it is not a metric it wants users to focus on. Any ā€œinformationā€ you may find about a pageā€™s PR is likely to be out-of-date or inaccurate.

As for page view, click through rate, etc. - ask yourself how Google (or any other search engine) is going to know about this? The best they can do is record traffic going from their own search results to a given page, but they have no idea of how much traffic you may be getting from elsewhere, or how many pages a visitor to your site may view once theyā€™ve arrived there via search. (Google has stated that Analytics data is not used in search rankings.)

The most important factor in ranking is the quality of your content, and its relevance to the search term.

2 Likes
19

As long as the pages contain the tracking code. the pageviews will be available for you in your Google Webmasters account.

AFAIK the outer page would be the referrer for the iframe page and it might make analyzing the data a bit more difficult.

A web page that uses frames generates multiple pageviews: one for the framing page that contains either a frameset or an iframe tag within its HTML code), and one for each page displayed in a frame.

In your navigation reports, each of these pageviews appears in a sequence:

Framing page > framed page 1 > frame page 2

As a result, your pageview totals may be inflated.

3 Likes
20

In my case i think having the outer page as the referrer will work to my advantage.

It would tell me which subdomain the iframe page was viewed from.

Thats exactly the info id need, i think, where the referrer is concerned.