Having 2 brands with the same content - will this work from an SEO perspective

[CFCU]

Hi All,

I would love if someone could help and provide some insights on this.  We're a financial institution and have a set of products that we offer.

We have recently joined with another brand and will now be offering all our products to their customers.

What we are looking to do is have 1 site that masks the content for both sites so it appears as there are 2 seperate brands with different content - in fact we have a main site and then a sister brand that offers the same products.

Is there anyway to do this so when someone searches for Credit Card from Brand A it is indexed under Brand A and same when someone searched for Credit Card from Brand B it is indexed under Brand B.

The one thing is we would not want to rel:can the pages nor be penalised by googles latest PR algorithm.

Hope someone can help!

Thanks

Dave

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Dave,

I'm struggling to understand your scenario. So are you looking to have all searches result in landing on pages within one domain, or will they remain on their respective domains?

-Andy

[badgergravling]

Hi,
  Duplicate content issues are created when the same content appears on two different urls. So if your content appears on www.yourexample.com/brandaproduct and www.yourexample.com/brandbproduct, then that's when it's an issue.

You can do this by changing dynamic elements via personalisation, but it's not necessarily easy to do, and could well end up risking a penalty for masking/cloaking if there's an error.

Personally, I'd rethink why you're running both brands - are they targeting different audiences/locations?

If there's no differentiation between the two brands, then there's no point in having them. But if one is targeting a different demographic, then there's a reason to create unique content which will appeal specifically to their audience. The actual product and data may be the same, but the benefit of bespoke content for the right audience will be an increase in conversion rates to actually purchase your services, rather than simply avoiding any SEO penalties...

It's an approach which is done by many, many companies. For example, I worked for a major UK publisher with 5 magazines all covering the same topic area, but one was aimed at beginners, one was for advanced users, and others concentrated on specific niches within the market...

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I wouldn't do this. What I would do is offer both sets of products under one site with distinctive brand names and markup. That way, your products will appear for their branded searches, with their own pages and rich snippets. I would not "mask" anything or try to trick search engines / users, because that's how you get penalized.

Hopefully I am understanding your question. I would really focus on what Dan Thorton said here...

"If there's no differentiation between the two brands, then there's no point in having them. But if one is targeting a different demographic, then there's a reason to create unique content which will appeal specifically to their audience. The actual product and data may be the same, but the benefit of bespoke content for the right audience will be an increase in conversion rates to actually purchase your services, rather than simply avoiding any SEO penalties..."

You have an opportunity here to have content that's targeted to two different audiences, and increase the overall conversion rate of your website by doing so. I would stick to this route and focus on building great content for each product, pleasing it's target audience.

Let me know if this helps or if you have any questions. Good luck!
Patrick

[BritneyMuller]

Hi David,

Curious why you're not interested in doing rel=canonicals? I think I understand your overall goal and would suggest simply hiring a content marketer or writer to differentiate the content from product A page to product B page.

Hiring a content marketer or writer to differentiate the content from one to the other would be well worth it in this situation. Have the writer re-organize and re-write the content (while maintaining the same message) so that crawlers will view each page as unique.

Cheers,

B

[CFCU]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the reply.  We have 2 brands that we have to run (coming from executive team - merger agreementt). Unfortunately both brands have been aligned to have exactly the same products.  There are 2 niches (ie personas) but the products are exactly the same, with the  same Product descriptions and same terms and conditions, rates and imagery.

Cheers,

Dave

[CFCU]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your awesome reply,   We have 2 brands that we have to run (coming from executive team - merger agreement). I'll maybe go back about unique content.

Cheers

[CFCU]

Thanks Patrick - it all helps heaps!!!

[CFCU]

Thanks B,

I'll suggest this as an option - the reason not to do rel can's is because we want to index organically on Google for both brands..

Cheers

D!

[BMullz]

Ah-ha! Ok, that makes sense. Realize it sucks to write unique copy for the same products, but I'm not aware of a better solution for that right now...I'll let you know if I come across anything though! : )

Thanks

[badgergravling]

The way to think about it is as an opportunity, rather than a cost.

Instead of having two competing brands for the same customer, you now have the opportunity to target two segments of potential customers much more effectively.

Plenty of examples exist of multiple brands under the same umbrella targetting different customer groups. For example in drinks, look at how many brands Coca Cola own - and why they'd buy brands like Innocent to get to a different market group....

In finance, you might want to target one brand at younger consumers who will then grow into the other brand.

Or one for those on a lower budget, for example.

And that will naturally lead to different and unique content. I supply a huge amount of content for businesses, and my structure, language and tone has to be different for each one to appeal to the customers they want.

[chill986]

I have a similar question (+ one additional one), and if I need to open a new thread, just let me know.

I have a client with 2 websites - one is a trucking and rigging company that specializes in installation / moving / removal of safes (site #1), the other offers a product line of safes (site #2).  I originally designed / implemented site #1 and was able to get "safe installation New York", "safe moving New York", and "safe removal New York" in the top 3 search results in.  A little over a year ago, client was approached by another marketing company to create the site #2, who also provided commercial services that I don't.  It was a business decision, and we remained in good relations.  As a result Site #1 went to the new marketing company and they built Site #2.

Fast forward to about 3 months ago - Site #1 was infected with malware, client wasn't happy with new service, and asked me to take back the Site #1 ( and remove malware), and take Site #2, and re-work the SEO.  SEO had dramatically fallen off for Site #1, so I've been working the SEO once I was able to get the malware completely removed and reviewed by Google.

Site #1 had been redesigned by the other marketing company, essentially retaining the content that I created.  Site #2 has mostly new content, but under "Services", it references the same services that Site #1 provides, but the content is exactly the same, except that references to the company for Site #1 also link to Site #1.  So there is duplicate content for 5 pages on both sites.  As it happens, Site #2 that SELLS safes, is ranking #2 for "safe installation new york" for exactly the same content as Site #1 that provides the services.  Site #1 ranks >50 for the same keyphrase.

Why would this be?  Has Site #2 taken the lead on this keyphrase because of the malware situation and now Site #1 is being penalized for duplicate content?

One other major change on Site #1 is that the web technician used Wordpress's built in page nesting (page is set as child to parent page - nested 3 deep in some cases).  What are the consequences (if there are any) of having a page listed as (for example) oztruckingandrigging.com/services/safe/safe-installation vs. oztruckingandrigging.com/safe-installation?  The reason I ask this is that when I Moz page optimize for the first one for "safe installation" I get a lower grade then when I Moz page optimize for the second one.

[CFCU]

Hi Cindy,

Great Question - I'm not sure what to suggest - probably suggest opening up a new question just to be sure you get eyes on it!

Good Luck!

[chill986]

Thanks David, will do!