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Hi

I have had sites myself with shared content and the end result was that neither of them ranked at all. They were set up in a pre-Penguin world (before 2011) and when the update really cut in September 2012 I lost 60% of my traffic in one day.

I have also worked on many sites who shared content across their own pages resulting in the same collapse in SERPS - You can read about the biggest mistake that website owners make here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

In certain circumstances, you can share others' content by way of syndication. You'll see it on MOZ occasionally. They will have produced a great article and at a later date will share it across some other article sites as the authority will have been established as a MOZ article. Note that these are small'ish articles, not whole sites.

What you are talking about is basically, willingly, creating a duplicate site to site A. If you do that your rankings on site A will fall and site B will never gain any rank at all if the content pages are duplicates.

Yes, a competitor could damage your site if they were so inclined. Negative SEO is the practice of sharing your content to a number of sources thereby creating mass duplication. While Google should recognise yours as the original that is rarely the the case.

Duplicate content is at the very core of SEO. If someone is telling you differently then they are wrong.

However, it is your website and I would completely agree with your strategy of playing devil's advocate. If it was my site I would want as much corroboration as possible. So go and ask other SEOs but make damn sure they know what they are talking about and it isn't a 'bloke down the pub! because it can cost you hugely.

We probably lost £½m through our own naivete - never again!

Regards Nigel

If you use Website A content then you must canonicalize otherwise you will destroy the site (A). If you want B to rank independently then it MUST have original content.

This is how it works I'm afraid. Get help from a copywriter, or a few if that helps keep the cost down,

Regards

Nigel

Well, we'll agree to disagree on that one Kris - good luck.

Hi imjonny

You are going to have a major problem trying to get these two sites listed at all in my opinion.

1. You are creating a multi-brand/store website in website A with menus reviews and about the stores & brands. 
2. When someone clicks the brand delivery on website A they will be directed to site B. - presumably, because site B handles all of the shipping and checkout processes.

If site B pulls the information from site A then you will kill both sites. I presume when you say 'pull' you mean it will also have that information on the pages?

So you are creating an unindexable monster that no amount of canonicalization, redirecting or iframe manipulation will help.

Presumably, you need to rank for site A but that is not possible if you are pulling content into site B. The only sensible thing I can think of is.

1. Canonicalize 'Store 1' on Site B to the equivalent store page on Site A. So store 1 on Site B  effectively does not exist at all.

2. Call Store B - 'Brand Delivery' and write acres of content about delivering brands on the home page and a load of supporting pages. You just won't rank for anything on the second site apart from 'Brand Delivery' and any contextually similar words.

It's a weird way of setting stuff up. If I were shopping on a site I would not want to go to a different site to check out. You will have two sites to manage presumably with the same NAP - (site ownership and address)  as well so that will not help.

The only way is to keep the two sites content mutually exclusive and use canonicals which of course can be done between different URLs.

If it was me I would keep site A and ditch the B idea but ho hum! 

Kind Regards

Nigel

Hi Ramjam

I have read a lot about HTML5 - but nowhere is there a direct comparison between the SEO rank in SERPS of an article separated by HTML5 tags vs an Article on a unique page marked up correctly.

My feeling is that given an article in the middle of a multi article single blog page and an article placed on its own page that the latter would rank much higher. However, I have no evidence to show you as there does not appear to be any.

If you still feel that this is a viable route to go then read this:

https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/the-truth-about-multiple-h1-tags-in-the-html5-era--webdesign-16824

Then place an article on the same page with others marked up correctly with HTML5 Headers, Article & H1 tags and one on its own unique page. See which rank higher.

Maybe this is a question we should put directly to Rand and ask him to do a whiteboard Friday on it. Every bit of SEO advice I have ever read has been about creating unique pages with their own defined content so this goes against all of that!

Regards

Nigel

There's nothing like a bit of self-promotion!

There are plenty of groups on Facebook where you can ask for links. Moz is not one of those places.

https://moz.com/community/q/brush-up-on-this-ins-and-outs-of-posting-to-moz-q-a

Thanks Nick

Hi David

That's great news!

As a matter of interest, where did they block it? as it's not in the Robots.txt - was in in htaccess.txt?

Regards

Nigel

Hi There,

I work with a lot of eCommerce sites and Roman's answer is great when the problem is to have the same product in colour or size variations.

You just set up one page:

site/leather-portfolio

This is a single product in sizes A3, A4 and 11"x17. create a page with the URL as shown then have 'attributes' on the page for sizes. Typically the attribute will be held behind a # or similar so will not be indexable. The canonical would just be site/leather-portfolio and the three sizes would be in the form of a drop down or swatches on a single page. Combine all of the text you would have spread over the pages on to this one making it super smart for SEO

Also, make sure that tags are non-indexable or canonicalized otherwise those sizes may append themselves to multiple URLs causing endless duplication.

Regards Nigel

It's a pleasure!

Hi Christina

I don't know how your site is set up but I can see that for some reason you are blocking access to the cgi-bin

If that directory contains files that execute php or other permissions then that may well be your problem. It's the only directory you are blocking and since I haven't seen other Robots.tx blocking it, then I would hazard a guess that this is the root of your problem.

Robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Sitemap: http://www.wychwoodflooring.com/sitemap.xml

Regards

Nigel

Hi Nick

You have two versions of the website indexed: http://www.hartnackandco.com and http://hartnackandco.com

if you do a search like this:

site:http://www.hartnackandco.com then there are indeed only 16 images. But if you do a site search like this

site: hartnackandco.com then you have tons of them! Yes that's where they were hiding!

You can specify your preferred version in Google Webmasters. You will need to add the non www version to webmasters to see proper indexing stats. Don't panic you can report n both. Might also be worth setting preferences in other places too. Server settings allow you to choose which way you want to the URL to look.

I hope that helps

Regards

Nigel

Hi Bankable

It used to be that whenever I touched a page there would be a fall. I'd messed with it and Google didn't like it! Now I find that any changes that add value rise in Google and quite quickly too! Pages that I edit are picked up very quickly, literally as often as Google passes by and re-indexes a page. You can get an idea of how frequently that is for these pages by searching for them then clicking on the green arrow right of the URL to see when they were last cached (See Image). Could be up to 4 weeks, but I find that the higher the page is up the hierarchy, the more frequently it gets crawled.

When you say Domains I think you mean URLs?

For on page content I would recommend you stick to 300 words+ and make sure that the content you are adding is focused around a single keyword or a small group of contextually similar keywords and short phrases. Don't splurge content between different pages - make sure the writing is focused.

I see little difference in changing 10 pages in one day or 10 pages over 10 days so go ahead and if you can improve on what's there quickly then do it.

Regards Nigel

QEnwn

Hi Ramjam

It sounds like you have all of your blog posts on one page and that the header for each post is an H1. This is really bad from an SEO point of view as the resulting page is huge and splattered with conflicting keywords. Google would have no idea how to rank the page and for what.

The best way to run your blog is to have a single page for each post - this is the only way that you can properly separate content and to write about properly themed and separate subjects. Then you can add appropriate META tags for each page (Title & Description) and focus on a single focus keywords or very tight selection of contextually similar keywords. Also remember that when you add images to name them the focus keyword to further help with the SEO of the page.

You can still use H1s on that page but keep them keyword focused and don't duplicate content across pages. You will find that each blog page will be listed in Google. Note: ensure that tags are turned off and categories are properly optimized when you do this as this can add duplicate content URLs.

I hope that helps

Regards

Nigel

Carousel Projects

Hi Andy

Personally I wouldn't worry about this being considered duplicate content - there are plenty of sites I work with who present sizing and pricing tables on multiple pages and they don't fall in to any difficulty. It's true you cannot and shouldn't have to canonicalize part of a page, that is silly.

Concentrate on presenting the best experience for the user with keyword rich content and highly contextual writing about your products and services. Wax lyrical about what you do and why the customer should work with you and make the pages deep and interesting.

People get so worried about a possible 'duplicate content penalty' (which doesn't exist by the way - Google just chooses the best 'version') they forget what is the correct and best user experience.

Regards

Nigel

Hi Wozniak

You run a real risk of picking up an algorithmical Panda penalty by having so much duplicate content across these pages. For websites that truly operate in geographic areas it is perfectly OK to have location pages for each of those places. However you really need to break this down and present interesting pages packed with local information.

This is going to require a bit of work but I would start from a blank template and just write original content or get a good copywriter to do it for you. Mention local landmarks, town history and places of significance. Make it really 'local'. Even include some photos of the town centre and make the URL of the photo eg /abbotsbury-carpet-cleaning.jpg and the alt tag eg "Abbotsbury Carpet Cleaning"

You will not only present a far better user experience but you will not risk any penalty either now or in the future.

Read more: https://inbound.org/blog/content-creation-strategy-for-businesses-with-multiple-location-pages

Regards

Nigel

Carousel Projects

Hi Nikki

The 301 from non www to www is a simple 301 tag from one to the other which will carry about 85% of the 'juice' which was attributed to the old page.

It is best practice to have a self referencing canonical on the new www page - this is so then when other sites like Twitter add a UTM to the end of the URL Google only recognises the single canonicalized URL.

It may be this that MOZ and Screaming Frog was picking up on this.

Regards Nigel

Hi Becky

It all comes down to intent. Whether you want to attract visitors to your page or your Youtube channel.

There is no direct SEO benefit by having a Youtube video on your page, you are essentially adding an outbound link even if it's nofollow - however it does provide really valuable information for the user. If cost is an issue and you feel you have no alternative then I would use a Youtube video.

The other benefit is that the video will be seen on that platform, the second biggest search network, and people searching for that product may click a link back to you. So if you are going to add videos to YouTube then make sure they are fully optimised.

Fill in the description fully with the a link back to your product page in the first line (It won't help with SEO as they are nofollowed - but it may result in people following the link back to your site)

Fully brand the video to heighten your own company's brand awareness - so maybe a 4 second sting at the beginning - then the video then a branded placeholder at the end.

Also make sure all of the tags are filled in for search & location etc are filled in advanced options.

MOZ use Wistia as a form of self hosting but do in fact put some videos on Youtube some months later. There is a new year video on Youtube - posted in May! (5 months later) - They title the two videos slightly differently so that they get two bites of the cherry for searchers. (Look up 'How To Create An SEO Strategy in 2017)

Finally: Note that Zappos do not use Youtube - Kind of says it all really!

http://www.zappos.com/p/rockport-essential-details-waterproof-apron-toe-dark-brown/product/8151504/color/325

I hope that helps!

Regards

Nigel 
Carousel Projects

Hi

Ironically MOZ will pick this up as a problem as it reports anything that is noindexed!

For me I just ignore noindex as a problem in certain cases as clearly it makes perfect sense to noindex certain pages and indeed sometimes whole directories.

I sometimes find that developers have noindexed directories like /new-products or /sale but clearly there are better ways of handling the potential duplicate problem here by adding a canonical. In you case it makes no sense having Google index the checkout pages.

Regards Nigel

Hi Martin

Surely if the traffic was coming from a different source then that would be in the URL of that source. Adding a UTM would simply create duplicate page content between the URL and the UTM tagged URL.

He'd then be faced with the tricky and potentially dangerous task of messing with parameters. I just wouldn't mess with creating UTM tagged URLs,

Apologies - I didn't mean to argue I just couldn't understand your logic.

Regards Nigel