Please forgive my question if it sounds naive. Our counseling and psychotherapy web site (www.northsuburbancounseling.net) has had page one placement (in addition to Google Local) for 2 years now thanks to the many things I have learned from this forum to put into place. Recently, however, (this past month) when I test our placement (typing in "couples counseling reading ma" or some other local town in my search string) we have dropped off of page one. I just checked my pagerank and it went from a 4 to a 3. I recently dumped my server due to downtime issues and am now on another server (Webzpro). I have new a primary domain in the new server account for our new life coaching web site (www.northsuburbancoaching.net) and was able to put a secondary domain within the same account and directory tree for our counseling and psychotherapy web site (www.northsuburbancounseling.net). My question is, can sharing this common account between my two web sites effect my search engine placement and page rank? Thanks in advance, njb
Moving to a new web host should not affect your PR generally speaking. That is more likely an algorithm change that has caused some of your inbound links to be devalued, or other sites linking to you have dropped in PR so they or passing your less, or other sites who used to link to you no longer do, or one of a thousand other inbound link related reasons. Your 2 sites are pretty much duplicates of one another... This is not really good. It looks like you simply changed a few words here and there to create the second site. If you cannot generate totally unique content for a second site then you are usually better off sticking with a single domain. Google has patents on how to detect even partial duplication of content. They can tell that the home page on your 1st domain is 87.395% duplicate of the content on the the home page of your 2nd domain. It could be that because of the move somehow, the old site's content is considered the duplicate and the new site (whose domain did not even exist until last month) is somehow the originator... But now the originator of the content has no inbound links... so neither is ranking well... Again, I think it was a bad move to create a second domain that looks like 80% of the content on its home page is an exact copy of the old domain's home page content with a few words changed here and there...
Thanks for the quick reply, Canonical and for the insight. We were going to do a rewrite of the page copy on the new site anyway, so this makes it even more critical.
Canonical makes many good points. I agree that you shouldn't have two extremely similar websites. Putting those 2 sites on the same ip makes it even more obvious that this is duplicate content from the same person. Then Google knows it is not just a matter of some website copying your content. When you move servers and have any kind of downtime in between, you do stand a chance of temporarily losing rankings. Google really doesn't like it when they can't access a website. If that is the cause of the rankings drop, you should move back to page 1 eventually. In the meantime, fasttrack that page copy rewrite and try to make that website have very little similarities with your other website. You also should work at building more backlinks to both websites.
Just moving an existing website from one host to another will not impact the site in anyway unless there is a major delay. To have two site on the same server that cross link will get you a penalty on both (Cross Linking Penalty). To have two sites with the same content no matter what server scenario will get you a penalty on both ( Duplicate Content Penalty).
Thanks, catanich. In addition to revamping the new site's page copy, I will get rid of any links between the sites as well.