3 Sites Covering Similar Topics & Panda
-
My question will take a bit of explaining, so here goes:
I have 3 blogs on the same server:
1. personal finance blog;
2. credit card blog;
3. prepaid credit card blog.
The personal finance blog is my flagship site started in 2007, which feeds my family and pays the mortgage. By contrast, the other two sites (started in 2008 and 2010) I would gladly kill if the result would help my personal finance blog.
In the fall of 2010 (before Panda) the prepaid card blog was penalized by Google. This has been confirmed by Google in response to a reconsideration request. Of course, they don't say why. I've tried a number of things and resubmitted the site, but with no luck.
Both the personal finance blog and credit card blog were hit by Panda 2 (April 11, 2011) and have not recovered.
While the personal finance site covers many topics (e.g., investing, credit, debt, money management), its income comes largely from credit cards. We review individual credit cards and have pages that list cards by category (e.g., balance transfer, cash back, travel).
The credit card blog does the same thing, but of course covers credit cards in more depth. There is a similar overlap between the prepaid card blog on the one hand, and the credit card blog and personal finance blog on the other. However, all content is unique.
I do not currently link between the sites, although until a few months ago I had blogroll links between the sites and a few (less than 10) content links.
If you've made it this far (and I hope you have), here are my questions:
1. Could the existence of the credit card and prepaid credit card sites be hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in Google, whether via Panda or otherwise?
2. If there is a reasonable chance that the answer to question 1 is yes, what would you suggest I do?
Of course, I could just take down the sites, but I wonder if there are other options.
One thought I had was to deindex the two card sites (I assume I can do this by disallowing googlebot via robots.txt) and give it time. Would Google treat this as if the sites did not exist? Both sites get a fair amount of traffic from bing and yahoo, so this option appeals to me. Of course, for all I know the existence of the two card sites are hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in bing and yahoo, too.
I thought about selling the sites, but if they are hurting my personal finance site, I grow concerned about how google distinguishes between a site being sold and a webmaster just trying to make the sites look like they are owned by different people. In this regard, I've never tried to hide the common ownership of the sites and have no intention of doing that now.
If I kill the sites, should I redirect them to my personal finance site? For the penalized prepaid card site, this seems both risky and unhelpful. But perhaps redirecting the credit card site is an option.
Given that the personal finance site is my livelihood, I greatly appreciate your thoughts on my dilemma.
-
I don't think the relationship of your other sites is having any effect on your rankings but it maybe Google post Panda is showing syndicated versions of your content as the most relevant. Finance and Making money online are very competitive niches and scraping/syndication is rife.
I recommend that you firstly make sure that when you publish your blog posts you are pinging pubsubhubbub to make sure Google knows you are the originating source.
Two questions:
Which landing pages and keywords have seen the biggest traffic change in the past 6-12 months?
Have you checked your competitor and your own link profiles for any recent changes ?
-
I don't think the content is duplicated, apart from some scrapers. I deal with the scrapers when I can, but I have to believe that the canonical tag and publication date take care of any issues.
As I said, I don't link between the sites anymore. I've had several people suggest that I move them to separate servers and even "hide" affiliate links by using redirects contained in folders that are blocked from search engines.
Maybe I'm naive here, but if I have to hide what I'm doing from search engines, I just don't do it.
-
Alan, appreciate the response. The more I think about it, I have to agree with your conclusion. There are plenty of companies that own multiple sites in the same vertical. It's well known, for example, that Bankrate owns creditcards.com and bankaholic. Each of these sites covers credit cards in depth.
-
I know what is like when you have a problem and can not find an aswer you start to see every thing as a potental cause, but I dont think it the other sites have anything to do with it.
-
I always look at these things the same...
If you have more than one site linking to other sites, ensure they are on a different server. OK, perhaps I am being overly cautious here, but knowing what Google can be like, I would not take chances.
If there are no links between the sites, then as long as the content is unique (as you say it is), then you have no problems from a duplication point of view. If each site serves a different purpose, there should be no problems.
I would need to look at the sites to get an idea why Panda hit them - there are so many possibilites. The main ones as we know though were thin or duplicate content and adverts.
Is there a possibility your content has been duplicated somewhere else?
Andy
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
-
AMP Benefits
Hello, Does AMP have ranking benefits ? Should I just AMP my post or all the pages of my website, product page, homepage etc... Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Should I just redirect all my sites to my main site.
Hi, Over the last few years I have built many sites and own a lot of domain names. Some have high page rank some have high domain authority and some have many back links. I'm finding it very difficult to keep up with all the links and being able to provide quality content for everything. Should I just redirect everything to my one site that make the most money as all sites are for the same industry, but in different categories of that industry. So I could 301 redirect all the sites to the relevant page on my money site. Would it be a problem is 1000's if not 10,000's of links all of a sudden pointed in to one site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cibble030 -
SEO Site Analysis
I am looking for a company doing a SEO analysis on our website www.interelectronix.com and write a optimization proposal incl. a budgetary quote for performing those optimizations.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | interelectronix0 -
Global navigation & backlinks to external sites
Hi guys, My company has a number of websites of which the main corporate site links to via its global navigation. This global navigation sits within a simple with no HTML <nav>markup. Every time a new page gets created on the main corporate, a backlink gets generated to those external sites. And the anchor text is always the same. As the corporate site publishes new pages frequently, I'm wondering whether this ongoing building of links using the same anchor text would be a cause of concern for Google (i.e. too many links from the same domain with the same anchor text). Would really appreciate some insight here, and what could be done to fix it if it's an issue. Many thanks </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cos20300 -
Link Reclimation & Redirects
Hello, I'm in the middle of a link reclamation project wherein we're identifying broken links, links pointing to dupe content etc. I found a forgotten co-brand which is effectively dupe content across 8 sub-domains, some of which have a significant number of links (200+ linking domains | 2k+ in-bound links). Question for the group is what's the optimal redirect option? Option 1: set 301 and maintain 1:1 URL mapping will pass all equity to applicable PLPs and theoretically improve rank for related keyword(s). requires a bit more configuration time and will likely have small effect on rank given links are widely distributed across URLs. Option 2: set 301 to redirect all requests to the associated sub-domain e.g. foo.mybrand.cobrand.com/page1.html and foo.mybrand.cobrand.com/page2 both redirect to foo.mybrand.com/ will accumulate all equity at the sub-domain level which theoretically will be roughly distributed throughout underlying pages and will limit risk of penalty to that sub-domain. Option 3: set 301 to redirect all requests to our homepage. easiest to configure & maintain, will accumulate the maximum equity on a priority page which should positively affect domain authority. run risk of being penalized for accumulating links en mass, risk penalty for spammy links on our primary sub-domain www, won't pass keyword specific equity to applicable pages. To be clear, I've done an initial scrub of anchor text and there were no signs of spam. I'm leaning towards #3, but interested in others perspectives. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PCampolo
Stefan0 -
Ranking a site in the USA
I'm UK based and looking at setting up a site to rank in the USA. As I understand it a .com TLD is best but these are used worldwide so do I simply need to set the geotargeting to USA in webmaster tools? Or is there a better domain to use? With hosting the site in US and on page content related to US cities (I plan to create a page for each US city I operate in the the city name in the H1 tag) will that be enough for google to understand that the page should rank in the US version of google. Also how can I view Google USA search results - when I go to google.com it automatically redirects to google.co.uk and I can only change the location on the left hand side to UK cities. Any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Any SEO suggestions for my site?
Site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp Does anyone have any suggestions for any on-site SEO that would benefit my website? Any recommendations, big or small are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor1 -
Site dancing
Hi guys I have a site which is dancing. I mean one day is on position 20 , if I put more backlinks is falling, after rising again,, I dont know what is going on. The site is 2 years old, pr 2, authority 35. Why this is happening? Usually when he appears again is ranking higher, but today he disappear totally from rankings. Maybe return tomorrow? But anyway why is dancing? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0