Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yes, but if the two sites are running off the same hosting environment, Google might get a little unhappy with that. But, all in all, I agree about the premise of hundreds of people using the same themes.

@Federico - I understand what you're saying and to a degree I agree, but for this case I want the two sides of the company to be very much visually linked. The services are different, however, they fall under the same umbrella. Think actual services (web, seo, etc.) and then consulting. Similar, but different. I'll take your thoughts into account though, I don't want to make a snappy decision. Cheers

@Branagan That's exactly what I thought, but I'm fairly confident that I've read about duplicate design penalties over the years, so I just wanted to checkin and see what everyones opinion is. I did spend some time Googling for the answer and couldn't come across anything worthwhile. I'm starting to think that it won't have an effect, provided the content is unique and of high quality.

Hi Mozzers,

There are lots of articles on using multiple domains for a company and we all know the story behind that. I have a different question though - I designed and built a really great WordPress theme for my company and it runs on xyz.com and has run on their for well over a year and has decent authority. I would now like to expand my business and offer a different service and I'd like to market the new service on abc.com

My question is: If I use unique content on the second domain, but the same WordPress theme, will it have a negative SEO effect on either site?

I should mention: I have my reasons for not just using the same domain for both services.

I'd love to see what everyone thinks

@Gianluca - Thank you very much for stepping in here, I know you're a busy man so this is appreciated. What you've suggested is definitely an option and I'll investigate that approach when I'm back in the office. Thank you kindly.

Unfortunately over thinking is a requirement here because the site's not ranking as it should be, and I cannot just be happy until I've made a plan unfortunately.

I appreciate your response mate, I just need someone a little more technical to assist me.

Hello fellow SEO fans, I've got a setup that I'm interested in some opinions on.

I have a website which has the following setup:

www.site.com (english version of the site)

www.site.com/nl (dutch version of the site)

Now, my experience tells me the dutch version would be written in dutch (not using Google Translate) and the meta data et al should also be in dutch. But my question is:

If somebody in, say, Netherlands perform a search in english for a specific keyword, we would want the www.site.com page to appear in the SERPs, not the www.site.com/nl page, because the person has searched in english. However, because there's a www.site.com/nl page, purely the /nl page will be optimized and linked to in order to rank it higher in the SERPs for dutch searches and not english searches? But if that's the case, then the person in the Netherlands searching for the english version of the keyword, probably won't see www.site.com in the ranks because of targeting and keyword distribution?

Bit of a tricky situation that I've been pondering over and can't quite put the nail on the head.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Ah, you know what the problem with SEMRush is, they don't cater for Traffic in South Africa, which is where I am based

SEMRush is a fantastic piece of software and I completely forgot about it. I was really hoping SEOmoz would have a tool, but it seems not. Thank you Streamline Metrics

Cheers Billy! I'll keep looking and see what others can say, and then give you a shout.

Worst comes to worst, I could use something like WebCEO to find the keywords on my site and then SEOmoz' Rank Checker to see the positions, just felt it would be incredibly useful to have an "all in one" solution because sometimes we miss really important keywords, that turn out to be ranking really well. I know Google Analytics can pick that up sometimes, but that's more about intuition than an actual tool.

Michael, in my question I ask for a tool that will find the keywords that my site ranks for. In other words, the tool "reads" the website, determines the keywords, and then crawls the Internet checking their positions. SEOmoz' Rank Checker can do what you're suggesting.. Unless I've misunderstood..

Nothing in the SEOmoz umbrella? Trying not to sign up for yet another SEO application

Hi folks,

Something I've never had to do before so I'm not sure which tool to use, but is there a way to determine the keywords that a website currently ranks for?

Hope someone can assist

Yeh, I could do that, but through other websites I noticed that it says it'll take effect only from November!

Anyway, sounds like I've done what I can and hopefully Google will crawl the website again soon and re-index appropriately

Hi Marie,

Yes, alright so when I search for the brand name in Google, it shows 6 site links as per usual. However, these site links have names such as Viagra, Spam, Spam, but their URL links are actual links on the website for proper content! So, the malware that got into the site managed to make use of proper URLs on the site, but change the title tags per say.

Does that make sense? So I don't want to demote links that are there, I just want to remove the bad title tags..

I was under the impression that you could only demote links, not actually change them? Strangely enough, for some reason I recall being able to see the active site links in Webmaster Tools, but when I check for this site, it only gives the option to demote?

Did you have a look at the file I made for you? Hope so, took me 20 minutes to compile and all

As William said, look for 301 or 302 mentioned in the .htaccess file, if those are mentioned there, that's a sign that things are being redirected.

A rebuild is always useful, but of course, the budget probably isn't there and I can respect that.

Let us know about the .htaccess file..

Hi Carl,

I immediately fired up Xenu and did a test, there's an option to set redirects as errors, to locate the redirects. Here's is the downloadable export: http://www.imoddigital.com/sleeponcall/sleeponcall.xlsx

When you look at the file in Excel, the redirect pages won't appear as 200, they'll either be 301 or 302, this will allow you to isolate the troublesome pages.

Please do check your .htaccess file like Justin has suggested, that would have been my very first point of call.

Hope that helps!

Christopher

@Melanie - I would monitor both the traffic and rankings - just to make sure that there isn't a sudden change in any regard. I would create an Analytics alert should the traffic suddenly drop by X% so that I was notified immediately and I would use a Rank Checker like SEOmoz has, or WebCEO or whichever one you prefer. If often depends on the site in question though, but I'd just keep an eye on things and if the traffic drops or the ranks decrease, then I'd remove the redirect.

Redirects are tricky and that guide that pasted above (perhaps use this: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/unifying-content-under-multilingual.html) covers quite a lot of what you're after.

The redirection could mess with your rankings, so that's why I suggest monitoring those. If you're not tracking a fairly large keyword basket, then watch the organic traffic closely for fluctuations (or use the notification I mentioned above).

This also depends on what countries you're taking into account and so forth.

Hi Nicola,

I was going to write you a really long reply and then I remembered a thread written by Google that goes into detail about multi-regional websites and all the bits and pieces. This is probably a really great read for you, more so than me leaving a long winded comment:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

I hope that helps?
Christopher