Clone sites at new company
-
I just came in house to our company for SEO. We have one main site and 182 that are exact duplicates and almost exact clones of the main site.
It's no surprise that half of these clones are deindexed already. The meta tags are just the domain name URL. I want to add unique text on the home page to each site, fix the meta tags and switch them up so they aren't clones.
Other than a huge rewrite of the code for each site, I'm not sure what else to do to prevent the rest from getting deindexed.
Is there any way to prevent the rest from getting deindexed?
-
What about turning them into regional sites? A has inventory located in this state, B inventory only in that state, etc. So they are not exact clones.
-
Hi CFSSEO,
I'm going through some older Q&A questions and wondering how this project is going for you. Is there anything more we can do to help you convince management that 182 clones aren't in their best interest?
-
If I inherited these sites and didn't have a boss to answer to I would deindex all of them but one intentionally.
I would then redirect them all to the main site.
"and so they want to get something out of them now."
ha... I would allow them to expire and use the savings to buy beer. Savings is what you will get out of them IMO.
-
CFSSEO
It sounds as if someone in the past thought having multiple sites would improve things. There is no point in even redirecting these.
1. Keep your main site.
2. If one or two of the clones happen to have any PA, DA - from different links than you have on main, you should redirect those pages to the same page on the main site. (Highly likely they do not)
3. On the other sites, take them down. Save money and time on hosting, etc.
4. Teach those in your company it must be about content, etc. and quality links and focus like crazy on the one.
5. On the chance someone would later question this, I would do a screenshot on every one possible showing the traffic to the site over the last 6 months in GA. (This is to protect you).6. When the main site increases in traffic, etc. Demand a raise!!
Best
-
The main site has inventory, the clone sites also have the same inventory listings. I believe the hope was that with more clone sites, the inventory will get more traffic and more sales OMG! Of course, that hasn't happened, but time and money went into these domains and so they want to get something out of them now.
The sites provide value to the people listing their stuff for sale, and to the user who finds items to buy. The sites do not actually have any backlinks but all link to the main site.
I think the best to hope for would be for these clone sites to just count as more backlinks to the main site because they are not ranking anywhere on their own.
-
The main site has inventory, the clone sites also have the same inventory listings. I believe the hope was that with more clone sites, the inventory will get more traffic and more sales OMG! Of course, that hasn't happened, but time and money went into these domains and so they want to get something out of them now.
I think the best to hope for would be for these clone sites to just count as more backlinks to the main site because they are not ranking anywhere on their own.
-
I've got the same thoughts as Aran.
What are these 182 sites for? Why do they exist? What are they meant to achieve?
If these sites are deindexed, do they have any value? Do these sites get any traffic? Does the mainsite get any traffic via these sites (and is this traffic worth anything - does any of this traffic convert?
Do these sites have any inbound links?
If these sites provide no value, no links, no business etc then I would seriously question why you need them.
The effort required to get these sites up and running and delivering some value is almost certainly going to be better spent on your main site.
-
To what end do you want to use the other sites for?
Surely, its easier to optimise one site than hundreds?
Will rewriting the other sites benefit you and if so will the benefits outweight the amount of work required, or could that effort be applied elsewhere to beefit the main site?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I revive the old domain or just redirect all the juicy links to my new site?
I'm about to acquire a domain with a lot of great/highly authoritative backlinks. The links pointing to the domain are quite powerful and the domain is an exact match TLD. I have two options (that I know of 😞 1. I could redirect all the links to their new home(s) on my new site which offers the same resources the old site used to offer. or 2. I could rebuild the tools/content on this site. Ideally, I'd transfer to my new site as all those powerful links could help all my rankings. However, I'm worried that some of the powerful links will de-link once they see the site redirects elsewhere, even though it's offering the same content. Also, option one isn't an exact match domain. Which, I know, shouldn't make a difference now-a-days but regardless of what people say, it still seems to help out some sites in less competitive niches. One more thing to note: The domain that I'm purchasing is about 25 years old. I'm leaning toward option one. I want to make sure I put my best foot forward on this investment and thought it wise to consult the SEO gods.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninel_P0 -
New domain or subdirectory?
I noticed my domain authority has dropped slightly in the recent update, and it has me re-thinking a strategy for a website I just recently launched. I purchased the domain name kansasisbeautiful.com about a year ago and have been working on building it for most of that time. Earlier in August, I went ahead and launched it. However, towards the end of the development of the website, I decided to just put it in a subdirectory of my parent company (my photography business) at mickeyshannon.com/kansas and redirected the kansasisbeautiful.com domain to the subdirectory. mickeyshannon.com is my photography business website. The Kansas website has it's own distinct design, but is powered completely by my photography. I created it for a few purposes, including promoting tourism to the state of Kansas and to publish a book on Kansas travel next year, but one of it's main goals is also to help sell my photography prints. I decided to put it in a subdirectory (mickeyshannon.com/kansas) as I had hoped it might drive more traffic into buying photo prints if it lived on my main website. However, I've been re-thinking my strategy and have been wondering if I'm competing against myself too much. Many of my photography prints have the name of a location in them and have their own URL per photo (for example: "Flint Hills Spring Sunrise" is at http://www.mickeyshannon.com/photo/flint-hills-spring-sunset/). It makes me wonder if the new Kansas travel website page for the Flint Hills (http://www.mickeyshannon.com/kansas/flint-hills/) is competing for that keyword. Would I be better moving mickeyshannon.com/kansas to kansasisbeautiful.com? I was worried having so many backlinks back to my photography site would send up red flags with Google as if the kansasisbeautiful.com website was just a spammy website created to push traffic to mickeyshannon.com when it really has it's own purpose. Any thoughts on whether using the domain name or keeping it at the subdomain level is better? Hopefully that made sense. Thanks, Mickey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VSphoto0 -
Site map creator
I have a large website with about 1300 pages. I can't find a good sitemap creator that will crawl the whole site and spit out the xml file. Any ideas or suggestions for good services? Also, a site this large, should I consider mutiple site maps?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dwebb0070 -
Site migration from non canonicalized site
Hi Mozzers - I'm working on a site migration from a non-canonicalized site - I am wondering about the best way to deal with that - should I ask them to canonicalize prior to migration? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Site Penalty After Changing Hosting Companies?
In one week's time, we've dropped from #3 on Page 1 of Google to Page 7 (similar on Bing). It looks like our traffic started to drop on 9/5 to 9/7 and has been a steady, rapid decline ever since. 1000s of pages are indexed, just suddenly ranking poorly -- even for branded terms. History:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ddwilliamson
--In January, we switched to a web redesign & new domain
--In August, our hosting server was slow & kept crashing so we migrated our site to a new hosting company. We're not currently using the old hosting server. All domains, redirects, .htaccess files should now be correct and site speeds are improved.
--In early September, our NEW hosting company had a DNS issue causing more slow speeds and downtime for about 1 wk. Originally they thought it was htaccess so they changed our htaccess file - no luck - then discovered it was DNS. DNS issue was finally resolved on September 6th -- one day before the penalty/traffic issue seemed to begin.
-- According to GWMT, it looks like there were crawls completed around 9/4-9/5 What we've tried:
--Webmaster Tools - Googlebot dropoff since 9/5 (see attached screenshot). Nothing flagged. No site health alerts. Fetch as Google works. No manual webspam actions found.
-- W3C link checker, screamingfrog SEO spider, Xenu Link Sleuth, OSE (found some 4xx errors so we've updated those links)
-- Majestic SEO - backlinks reviewed 9/3 to 9/8
-- spoke to two different Adwords salespeople; unable to help
-- Bing Webmaster Tools
-- not showing organic search traffic since 9/6
-- 15% fewer pages crawled this month
-- top keywords are very odd -- stuff like "mt1 google apis" and "aaremel"
-- there are 4xx crawl errors under Crawl Information. We've fixed those URLs but they still appear in Webmaster Tools
-- some missing h1's and meta's, and dup titles, which we're working to fix
-- spike in crawl errors 9/11-9/12 and again on 9/14-9/15 It's been one thing after another this year, but all issues are now resolved with the exception of this newly-discovered penalty. We also have sites on a separate hosting server (with a different hosting company) that rank just fine. googlebot-crawls.jpg0 -
301s from previous site
Hi! Got quite a tricky problem regarding a client, http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/ and their previous site, http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/ Here's the background: We have approx 1500 'listing' pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/listing/view/1925/the-barre-des-ecrins-or-the-dome-des-ecrins-mountaineering-trip They bring in min 2k hits/month, and also add to the overall site authority I suspect. They will eventually all have a home on main domain. When they do, they will also each have been rewritten to be unique, so the value of them will increase (many are currently not). We also have landing pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/view/559/volunteering-holidays- which despite being hideous are ranked fairly well (page 1 for key terms). We cannot currently fulfil all these on main domain, but do not want to shut them down and lose positioning. Choices as I see it: Make a landing page e.g. muchbetteradventures.com/volunteering and a) redirect from old landing page, b) redirect all related 'listings' to this page. May help preserve rankings of main landing page (the most important), but not of any listings? Import all listings to have a home on main domain, (probably as children of a landing page, but not rewritten to be unique just yet). Make them not accessible from homepage, and change functionality of them so that new visitors from google are told we cannot currently help them with this trip. This is more work to complete so will take longer to do and is a distraction from our core focus so needs good justification! Stay running largely as we are, slowly redirecting 1 page at a time as we carry over more and more options to main domain. This will take over 12 months min.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Understanding the levels in my site
How can I figure out which pages are on the same level on my site ? I created an automatic sitemap with a software online but it doesn't tell me abc page is on the 1 st level, xyz page is on the second level etc... and I have a hard time figuring out if my main menu is on the same level as my drop down menu as it is visible on the same page. Is there anyway to figure what which pages are on the same level ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Need help or explanation on my site!
My site has suffered greatly since the recent Google update. I have done everything as suggested. I have had all bad links removed over 2 months ago. I have lowered keyword density (not easy since the keyword is in our company name!). I have rewritten various content and bolstered our existing content. What gives? What can I do? As an example the keyword, "maysville plumber" - I rank about 40th for this keyword. The first three pages are filled with websites with literally NO content or no added value. Maysville is a town of about 1k residents - there is no competition. Before the update I was #1 for years on this particular keyword. And this is the case with 35 other cities (mostly small cities, but a few larger ones). Please help me understand or suggest what I can possibly do at this point. We have hundreds of pages of unique content on each and every page. We have zero duplicate content (I have ran tests and crawlers). We have no fishy links. I have not gotten any messages from google on Webmasters. PLEASE HELP!! I asked a similar question a little while back and fixed all of the suggestions. My site is www.akinsplumbing.net.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chuckakins0