1st Ecommerce site got penalized, can we start a 2nd one?

[BobGW]

Hello,

A client's first site got penalized by Goolge Penguin. It has recovered through cleaning up backlinks, but not to where it was before. It is 2nd and 3rd for several money keywords, but is far less successful than before penalization.

We are starting a second site. Here's the important steps to mention

The new site shows up first for it's domain name, and it has 30 pages indexed. It shows up NOWHERE for our leading search term. Out other site has a blog post that is 3rd for that search term.

We are using new categories and new organization.

We are using a different cart solution

We are adding all unique content

The home pages and some of the product pages are very thorough. We are adding comprehensive products like nothing else in the industry (10X)

We plan on adding a very comprehensive blog, but haven't started yet.

We've added the top 100 products so far. Our other store has 500.

There's a lot of spam in the industry, so sites are slow to rank.

Our category descriptions are 500 words

Again, all unique content. No major errors in Moz Campaign tools

Just a few categories so far, we're going to add many more.

Same Google Analytics account as our other site

It looks like we should eventually be on page 3 for our major search term. Again, we're nowhere for anything right now.

...

Have you seen that Google will not rank a second site because it's from the same company and Google Analytics account, or does Google let you rank 2 sites in the same industry? We are hoping it's just slow to rank.

If you can rank 2 sites, what are your best recommendations to help show up?

Thanks.

[Guest]

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[GWMSEO]

If you launch a duplicate site, Google will sniff it out and neither site will rank because they will treat them as one site with duplicate content. I had an issue like this for 2 legitimate sites with the same content and different brands. When we went with cross domain canonicals, we started ranking in a big way.

Without improving Backlinks, Content Quality and UX, your site will not achieve it's old rankings. The site was getting ranked because of link spam, and when those links spammy links go bye-bye your rankings go with them.

With the new "kinder & gentler" penguin, stick to 1 site and focus on making the current site awesome and acquiring high quality backlinks.