White branded website & SEO
-
Hi guys,
We might have as a new project to create a white branded website for a big portal in our local market (which have a strongest domain than ours): the goal will be to reach their big mass of users and if possible, place this new site BEHIND us on the SERPs.
Since the content of the new website will basically be the same, we are considering 2 solutions:
-
to "noindex" the site on search engines, which is a "secure" way to not create ourself a competitor
-
to allow the site to be indexed on search engines but using the "rel=canonical" strategy to not be affected by duplicate content penalties
(For example, we plan to add rel='canonical' href='http://www.ourdomain.com/category1/product2' /> on their page http://newsubdomain.theirdomain.com/category1/product2)
The main question is: can the white branded website rank better than our site even with the "canonical" strategy?
(Of course we could "lower" the quality of the white-branded website pages to avoid that risk... but if somebody has better advices, we would be glad to hear them
)
-
-
This would mean that we have to lower the quality of the white-branded website pages (putting less filters, contents) or simply "nofollow" it..
Thanks Matt for your opinion!
(For the ones interested in the topic, there is also an interesting blog post + comments here: http://moz.com/ugc/using-whitelabel-sites-for-seo)
-
I think I am in a good position to answer this as in February I completed a project which created clones or White Label exact copies of one of the websites I work on. The content, the pages, the URL's and everything was the same. We did give them all slight design changes though. The site has around 30 duplications now around the web. The reason for these White Label websites is due to having "salesmen" of our branded products who are self employed and needed a website to point their own clients and customers to in the hope that it shows off the range.
Now we developed 30 of these and the first couple I started using canonical tags on every single page except the homepage. Even though largely successful, there were still some pages indexed above the main website in SERP's - luckily for no major keywords. It shows that canonical does not work in every single case perfectly.
Since then, we have noindexed and nofollowed every single link on each site and none of them are indexed nor ranked in search results now. In addition to this, we also set up canonical tags to be safe.
Hopefully that helps!
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
-
How do you select which keywords to push in SEO?
Hi Guys Selecting the right keywords that a website can realistically rank for is a key to gain top rankings relatively quick. I am just curious to hear how you guys do it (the methodology) when selecting which keywords to push? I mean you need to check the competition for each keyword as well so how to check this quickly to see what we realistically can rank for? Cheers John
Competitive Research | | igniterman751 -
Is it possible to find out how many indexed pages a website had at particular dates in the past?
I've found all kinds of websites and tools that can tell me how many pages a site has indexed currently, but how about historically? Does such a tool exist?
Competitive Research | | bigvibes9090 -
Historical domain analysis & competitive link analysis
Hi. I have a problem with the analysis of my campaign and specialy with the historical domain and the competitive link. I don't see any upgrade since july. Thank you for your help. A.Reille
Competitive Research | | Alex750 -
Creating Free Website Accounts (Weebly, Wix, Wordpress.com, etc) for Linking Purposes?
Greetings Mozzers, I came a cross several sites and when looking at their link profile I found they had several links from these free services to gain links. Obviously duplicate content is bad, but if all the content on each one was completely unique, would these links be of quality? Let's say, 1 link per site that is external to your site. I know it's a tricky topic but just wanted thoughts, would the above be a potentially beneficial method for gaining a simple quality link. Your advice and information is much appreciated!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
Is there an SEO benefit to purchasing domains for a website?
Greetings Mozzers, I wanted to see if someone could clarify the power of domains for me a bit. Is there an SEO benefit in purchasing fresh domains for a specific website? Something that would effect certain metrics like parking keyword domains to pages that target that keyword? I'm not talking about buying pre-existing domains that have value and are for sale. I'm talking about newly registered domains. Thanks for any advice/clarification.
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
Why does the link analysis of my website say I have no links?
When I click on the "Link Analysis" tab it says my website has a domain authority of 1 and has 0's for every other category. When I run it in Open Site Explorer - it says I have a page authority of 51 with over 4600 links. My website also seems to be at a stand still over the past several weeks. Anyone know why the two Link Analysis is not showing anything? Thank you
Competitive Research | | tyler7560 -
Should I move my brand under our corporate domain to boost Domain Authority?
Dear Community, I am seeking your expert advice on this situation: We have these assets as a starting point: a long-existing and well-linked Corporate Website (CW) with good metrics, a Brand Website (BW) with low/medium metrics, and some Brand Competitor (BC) websites with very similar metrics to BW. We will launch a new version of BW very soon with a well SEOd structure and copy (the old one was not SEOd at all) which I hope itself will bring SERP advantages. My dilemma emerged after checking the domain level values of our Corporate Website: CW / BW / BCs Domain Authority: 48 / 28 / 24-27 Domain mozRank: 4.79 / 3.15 / 2.6-3.25 Domain mozTrust: 4.73 / 2.79 / 2.47-3.06 My understanding is that based on seoMoz consensus domain level values give about 1/4th of the total pie. Based on these what do you think I should to win over competitors rankings? Should I keep running the service under BW (in an neighborhood with nearly identically valued competitors) Should I redirect BW to a sub-folder of the Corporate Website? (e.g.www.corporate.com/brand) with 301 redirects and enjoy the advantages of the much better domain values Alternatively, I could also build valuable and keyword-optimized content under our CW linking back to our BW. My understanding is that Option 1 has the least advantages among the three. Option 2 and 3 compete with the following advantages: Option 2: We could quickly rank higher as domain values elevate us from the mediocre BW and BC values (offsetting a little loss on 301 redirects) Option 3 would allow us to occuppy more positions for the important keywords on SERPs thus attract more "deep-browsing" visitors (and possibly BW could also get some advantages by receiving links from CW) Which direction would you proceed from here? Cheers, Andrew
Competitive Research | | andrew12120