Leveraging A Second Site
-
Hi,
A client of mine has an opportunity to buy/control another site in the same niche. The client's site is the top-ranked site for the niche. The second site is also often top half of page one. The second site has a 15 year old design that is a really bad, almost non-functional, user experience and thin content. The client's site (site 1) has the best link profile and dominates organic search, but the second site's link profile is as good as our nearest competitor's link profile. Both sites have been around forever. Both sites operate in the affiliate marketing space. The client's site is a multi million dollar enterprise.
If the object were to wring the most ROI out of the second site, would you:
A) Make the second site not much more than a link slave to the first, going through the trouble to keep everything separate, including owner, hosting, G/A, log-on IPs, so as not to devalue the links to 1st site, etc?
Or...
B) Develop the second site and not worry about hiding that both are the same owner.
Or...
C) Develop the second site and still worry about it keeping it all hidden from Google.
Or...
D) Buy the second site and forward the whole thing to site 1.
I know the white hat answer is "B," but would like to hear considerations for these options and any others.
Thanks!
P.S.,
My pet peeve is folks who slam a fast/insufficient answer into an unanswered question, just to be the first. So, please don't.
-
Okay, thanks Egol!
Best... Mike
-
Thanks!
I understand your comment about "knowing it when you see it".
I am not looking for work. We are way to busy here working on our own sites and have not done work for others in over a decade.
-
Hi Egol,
Thanks for the insight. I'm going for "B," for the reasons you stated, plus hiding stuff from Google is a lot of extra work.
On insufficient first answers answers, I'll reference Supreme Court Justices Potter Stewart's famous remark about obscenity, "I know it when I see it."
You, of course, provided a great answer for which I am sincerely grateful. Thank you!
Finally, pardon my denseness, but in your last paragraph are you saying you are looking for work or are not? If you are, direct message me because I'm about maxed out work-wise.
Thanks! Best... Mike
-
If the object were to wring the most ROI out of the second site, would you:
I can't say what I would do without a deep deep understanding of the site. I wrestle with these questions about pairs of sites that I have owned for ten years. A good decision has to consider many things, some of which are... A) content overlap, B) revenue source overlap, C) staff and financial resources available to work on another site, D) staff and financial resources required to improve the other site compared to the financial benefits expected, E) how close the competition is to kicking my primary site's ass, F) how close my primary site is to kicking competition's ass, G) how the profitability and fun elements of this job compare to the MANY others that are currently on backburners at my office, H) and, most important, how much mental energy I have for the fight.
A) Make the second site not much more than a link slave to the first, going through the trouble to keep everything separate, including owner, hosting, G/A, log-on IPs, so as not to devalue the links to 1st site, etc?
I would never take this choice. Just redirect the site instead of doing something that you think you gotta hide. This choice assumes that Google is a dumbass. They ain't.
B) Develop the second site and not worry about hiding that both are the same owner.
I have one domain that is a large site and competes with two smaller sites that I also own. The smaller sites have a niche specialty, so only a tiny fraction of the large site competes with them. All of these sites have the same whois, they are all in my webmaster console, they all have the same authorship style and are hosted at the same company in the same building. They all have absolutely unique content, very different, even if same subject. There are also some links between the sites, not a lot, no money anchor text, and the links are disclosed as being affiliated or both sites owned by same company. If you do all of the above, I don't think that you need to worry about Google getting angry about it. These sites have been doing this for ten years.
C) Develop the second site and still worry about it keeping it all hidden from Google.
I think that Google knows a lot about who owns websites. I might have private whois if I don't want people getting in touch, but I would not worry about Google knowing that same company owns them as long as you are not doing anything sneaky.
D) Buy the second site and forward the whole thing to site 1.
This is white hat in my opinion, but if both sites have similar link profiles at the domain level then you might not gain much from this method. Careful study is needed to decide if this is better than option B. How much work is needed to get the second site up to your standards and improve it to a point that it will become more competitive.
My pet peeve is folks who slam a fast/insufficient answer into an unanswered question, just to be the first. So, please don't.
How do you know their intent? Fast answers might not have that intent. Maybe my answer is Insufficient because I didn't give an answer that will satisfy a lot of people. Why? I didn't give an absolute answer because there isn't one without a really detailed study that I don't have time or any intentions to give. My pet peeve is when people want a $2000 answer for free in a forum and think that a $200 answer is crap because it didn't give an absolute answer.
I think that you either say "thanks" or nothing to anyone who gives you their time. An absolute answer to your question would require a content audit, a link audit, and a lot of information about your company and the industry just to get started. I think that it is a five digit question in many situations. And, you could pay five digits to two different people and get two very different answers. In that situation, you would need to decide who to believe. How are you going to do that?.
I am not providing a insufficient answer here because I am looking for paid work. I simply give two cent answers to people who might appreciate them. I took a chance on you.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Duplicate content site not penalized
Was reviewing a site, www.adspecialtyproductscatalog.com, and noted that even though there are over 50,000 total issues found by automated crawls, including 3000 pages with duplicate titles and 6,000 with duplicate content this site still ranks high for primary keywords. The same essay's worth of content is pasted at the bottom of every single page. What gives, Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
Are bloggs published on blog platforms and on our own site be considered duplicate content?
Hi, SEO wizards! My company has a company blog on Medium (https://blog.scratchmm.com/). Recently, we decided to move it to our own site to drive more traffic to our domain (https://scratchmm.com/blog/). We re-published all Medium blogs to our own website. If we keep the Medium blog posts, will this be considered duplicate content and will our website rankings we affected in any way? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
WP Datar site shady linking to my site
Hello, I have done some research on this but cannot find a solid answer to my question. After recently reviewing my "not found" errors in webmaster tools, I see that a site called "WP Datar" has linked to a number of our pages that actually do not exist. I am wondering first, if this will harm our site, and second, what is the best way to get those links from their site taken down? I tried emailing, but of course, the email address listed on the site did not work. 🙂 Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lfrazer0 -
How do I know for sure if my site has been slapped?
I'm new to this SEO business - and I focus on inbound marketing. My client's site is www.SubconsciousMind.com. Just a few weeks ago it was showing in the top search results for several major keywords. Now, it has disappeared all together and there are competitors showing that have very little SEO (metatarsi not set up properly, etc.). So, I know there has to be an opportunity. Some obvious things:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SoundsLikeJoy
There aren't a lot of links and the majority seem to be bad (bad linking farms)
Social media is set up by a robot
Articles are poorly written obviously ONLY for SEO My client hired a SEO company awhile back to get results, not understanding black hat / white hat and it worked for several years. Now - it is really hurting her. The sites she is linking to doesn't have any contact info to get the "unlinked." I've read I can use the disavow tool. I asked her if she got anything from Google about "being slapped". She doesn't even receive the emails to her site because she trusted someone else to set it all up. Should I rebuild from scratch? Any recommendations? We are funning adwords now as a quick fix.0 -
People buying links to their profiles on my site
As we have a major Penguin update looming in the background, I am looking for expert advice on how to deal with professionals buying into link programs whether they are doing it deliberately or not. Our site provides detailed profile information on hundreds of 1000's of professionals and some professionals apparently believed that buying into link program will lift their profile in the SERPS. About 10 professionals have paid shady link building companies to buy links to their profiles on our site. The biggest offender bought over 1,500 links to his profile. Aside from adding the known toxic links to our disavow file, what else can we do to avoid any link penalties? I can think of three distinct options and would love to hear feedback especially based on actual experience. Option 1. 404 the existing profile - "http://www.anysite.com/jones_smith" and create a new URL "http://www.anysite.com/jones_smith_1". Option 2. Keep the existing URL and fully rely on the disavow file. Contact the professionals and kindly ask them to stop buying links and to contact their link building companies to remove the links. Any other ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | irvingw0 -
Should we add our site to Google Webmaster Tools
Hello, Should we add our site nlpca(dot)com to google webmaster tools? Everything's very white hat but we do have a section on each of our 4 sites for "Our other Sites" that link to the others. It's been there for many years. We're looking for clues as to why we've dropped in rank Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Link Building: High Ranking Site vs. Relevancy
Hello, When link building, is it acceptable to link with a site that has high authority but has minimal relevancy to our site? For example, if we sell nutritional products and the link exchange would be with a site that relates to free coupons, would that work? Also, if we are publishing articles on other sites, should we also publish them on our own site? Should we add "nofollow" if we publish them in our site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | odegi0 -
Beaten in SERP's by a site going 'all in' on 2 keywords in their anchor text profile.
I would like to get peoples thoughts on putting 80% of your anchor text links in just 2 keywords vs a nice spread of branded and longtail keywords.. like I am. recently fell off the first page for a key SERP.. and the site in P10 has gone nuts on just that two keyword's.. I know we have a good site onpage/ conversion / low bounce rate page views etc.. Pretty sure we get more traffic than them. Seems that this obvious bloated anchor text profiling has worked for them though.. What do you guys think/know?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robertrRSwalters0