I'm new to SEO, but I've learned the basics over the last couple months and I'm beginning to get into the more advanced strategies. I have a friend who wants me to optimize his websites for him. He doesn’t know anything about the Internet, much less SEO. He has two websites that have a few hundred pages and are about the exact same theme. He obviously doesn’t know any better because he has all of the interior pages linked to each other from the two sites and very similar content on each page for both sites. In some paragraphs, its identical content. One of the sites gets about 1.5 million page views a month and ranks pretty well in the Google and the others. The other site does not rank well at all. This is the newer of the two that doesn’t rank well. The difference in rankings between these two sites is very large. The older site will have a number one ranking and the newer one won’t even be in the SERPs for the same keyword. Now, the on-page factors of both sites are pretty similar, except for the title on the site that doesn’t rank well is not optimized. The off-page factors are much better for the site that ranks well, for it has many more links. My questions are: Is the probability high that the newer site is suffering a penalty, which is why its rankings are so poor. Second, my friend is not going to like the idea of changing the content on the newer site to make it unique, even though I know it’s necessary. Should I start by getting rid of all the interlinking between the sites? Could this potentially help it escape its penalty if there is one? Your thoughts are greatly appreciated. Thanks, Noah
Get rid of the interlinking immediately! Otherwise you may have 2 penalized sites soon. You are also correct in the fact that you need to get his lazy butt to remove the entire duplicate content from new site and create a totally new site with fresh content. One thing I don’t understand is; if you have a dominant site in organic SERP’s, why bother with the second site. I would put my energy into the old site and forget the new. D
Brace yourself for a duplicate content penalty. Google will list the one site and the other will never show. The interlinking will kill you too.
Change ... Fast .. At least : 30% percent of on-page text on the new site. Inter-links between the two sites. Delete them all. Titles and meta description change them to be unique, and at least 60% different , on the two sites. Also .. IF other websites, link (in the same page/website) to both sites you have/own, delete the link to the newer site. LEave only the link to the well-established site. I can't think of other measures for now.
I agree with most of what was said above. I definitely think the inter-linking 'could' be hurting the rankings. As for dup. content, usually a different template and minor changes in the text will get the page under the 60%-70% mark for the dup. content filter. As for the new site...how new is it? It might be caught in the sandbox filter and that's why it's not ranking. Only thing you can do with that is wait and continue to gather incoming links, using varying anchor texts streamed through multiple pages.
Thanks for your thoughts. The older site has been online since 1994 and the newer one since 1996, so the sandbox wouldn't come into play. I believe it is a dub content penalty and its probably been that way for years. I'm just helping this old timer out cause he hasn't a clue he's doing anything wrong. Could you expand a bit on the 60%-70% mark for the dub content filter. Is there a way I can check to make sure I'm under it?
Duplicate content tool: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php Another method is to use copyscape: http://www.copyscape.com/
The inter-linking is going to hurt you. Yahoo looks at it as an artificial way to build link popularity.