Competitor has same site with multiple languages
-
Hey Moz,
I am working with a dating review website and we have noticed one of our competitors is basically making duplicated of their site with .com, .de, .co.uk, etc.
My first thought is this is basically a way to game the system but I could be wrong.
They are tapping into googles geo results by including major cities in each state, i.e. "dating in texas" "dating in atlanta" however the content itself doesn't really change. I can't figure out exactly why they are ranking so much higher. For example using some other SEO tools they have a traffic estimate of $500,000 monthly, where as we are sitting around $2000. So, either the traffic estimates are grossly misrepresenting traffic volume, OR they really are crushing it.
TLDR: Is geo locating/translating sites a valid way to create backlinks? It's seems a lot like a PBN.
-
1. Good!
2. You are confused for good reason. There has not been clear direction for here for some time. If you used HREFLANG between the two, it seems for the last number of years the content would not be seen as duplicative. You are telling Google that the content is the same but in different languages inherently.
3. There is so much that goes into this, but I can tell you with years of experience under my belt that the numbers don't ever tell the whole story.
-
Thank you!
-
We have decided that localizing is not worth it, it appears spammy and we cannot offer curated content on that level.
-
I am still a little confused about HrefLang. For example lets say we have a .com and a .de website. Both are nearly identical with the exception of hreflang and a handful or product/pricing descriptions (for example the US website might not list german specific dating sites, where as the german site will most likely include most major dating sites simply because they have the reach). Does google see this as duplicate content? Or does the hreflang indicate to google that this should be treated as two different websites.
-
To sum this up, we are trying to determine just how our competition has such a large keyword footprint when as far as the numbers are concerned (page count, wordcount etc) we are basically on the same level.
-
-
This is a tough one because there are reasons on both sides of the street to give reasons why this duplicate content should and should not be allowed. Think about an ERP SAAS company that needs to change their content just a bit between countries. They might build what looks to be duplicate but doesn't have some pages in one country vs another.
In your example, it seems to be not a great experience, but as a logged in user, they might be getting different content depending on their location.
To my second point: Those outside tools are shit. Total shit. Don't trust those numbers. Do your numbers line up to theirs?
Final point: Do not build and maintain duplicate content in hopes of getting links. It won't work over time. Anything can work for a short period of time, but in the end, they will figure it out. Trust me.
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
-
Server and multiple sites
We have multiple sites selling similar products in different ways but have always kept them separate on the off chance that google does not like it or they penalize one site. We have always put them on different servers but now thinking for performance as they are on shared hosting to put them on a single server which would be our own but we do not know the SEO considerations. We can assign multiple IPs to a server but I am not 100% sure whether there is still a negative impact of running multiple sites on the same server even if from a different IP. Any help would be appreciated, what I am really asking is could if they are on the same server with different IP's be still linked together by google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
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 -
Will including a global-site link in all 100 local-sites footer be considered spammy?
If I am a car manufacturer brand site(global), and I request all my location-specific domains include a link to the global site in their footers, would this trigger a red flag for Google? There are roughly 100 location-specific sites, but I would like to come up with a long term solution, so this number could be larger in the future. Is it best practice to only follow the footer link on each location-specific site Homepage, and nofollow the rest of the footer links on each site? Is it best to only include one followed link to the manufacturer brand site (global) on each location-specific domain? Is it best to not put this global link in the footer, but rather towards the top of the page only on the homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Google URL Shortener- Should I use one or multiple???
I have a client with a number of YouTube videos. I'm using Google URL Shortner to allow the link to show in the YouTube text (as its a long URL). Many of these links go to the same page ex .com/services-page Should I use a single short URL for each video linking to the .com/services-page or should they be unique each time? If unique, would Google possibly think I'm trying to manipulate results? Thanks in advance. I'm just not sure on this one and hope someone knows best practice on this. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mgordon1 -
G.A. question - removing a specific page's data from total site's results?
I hope I can explain this clearly, hang in there! One of the clients of the law firm I work for does some SEO work for the firm and one thing he has been doing is googling a certain keyword over and over again to trick google's auto fill into using that keyword. When he runs his program he generates around 500 hits to one of our attorney's bio pages. This happens once or twice a week, and since I don't consider them real organic traffic it has been really messing up my GA reports. Is there a way to block that landing page from my overall reports? Or is there a better way to deal with the skewed data? Any help or advice is appreciated, I am still so new to SEO I feel like a lot of my questions are obvious, but please go easy on me!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MyOwnSEO0 -
Should we remove our "index" pages (alphabetical link list to all of the products on the site)?
We run an e-commerce site with a large number of product families, with each family having a number of products within it. We have a set of pages (26 - one for each letter A-Z) that are lists of links to the product family pages. We originally created these pages thinking it would aid in discoverability of these pages to search engines, of course as time has gone on, techniques like this have fallen out of favor with Google as it provides negligible value to the user. Should we consider removing these pages from the site overall? Is it possible that it could be viewed by Panda as resembling a link farm? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI1 -
Our site has too many backlinks! How can we do a bad backlink audit?
Webmaster Tools is saying we have close to 24 million links to our site. The site has been around since the mid 90s and has accumulated all these links since. We also have our own network of sites that have links in their templates to our main site. I'm fighting to get these links "nofollow"'d but upper management seems scared to alter this practice. This past year we've found our rankings have dropped significantly and suspect it's due to some spammy backlinks or being penalized for doing an accidental link scheme network. 24 million links is too many to check manually for using the disavow tool and it seems that bulk services out there to check backlinks can't even come close. What's an SEO to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seoninjaz0 -
Alt tag best practices for a mutli gallery site with hundreds of images
I have neglected to add alt tags to one of my sites, and am ready to tackle the project. I want to make sure I do not do something that will have a negative impact on rankings....and I have not been able to find info that fits my situation. The pics are all about a product I make and sell through the site. I have a free gallery section that has about 10 galleries with about 20 pics each. Each gallery page has a different model and/or context of how the product. might be used. These are not sales pages directly just thumbnail galleries linked to larger images for the viewers enjoyment. I have 10 or so keyword phrases that would be good to use, with the intent to start getting listed in google images and other rank enhancements. Can I choose one keyword phrase as my alt tag choice for a whole gallery and give each individual large pic in the gallery that same alt tag, And use a different phrase for the next gallery's pics etc.? Or is that thought of as stuffing, and I would have to come up with a different keyword phrase for each pic? I hope that makes sense. Thanks Galen
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tetruss0