Hi guys, Say I have a website that sell "widgets", I currently have over 300 different widgets on-line on website A. I am currently not ranked very well in Yahoo or MSN (only well in Google). I like to start new site B and try to get more traffic (from all SE's). Question I have is: 1) Is it safe to start website B (not a doorway) with similar design and shopping cart software and the same 300 widgets? Obviously the description and specifications of the widgets will have similar if not same. 2) Will Google penalize (duplicate penalty) site A if I did this? If so, how do I prevent it? Is this a good idea or am I asking for trouble? I always hear webmasters who have multiple websites for the same "purpose" or selling the same products. Any thoughts or recommendations?
You are asking for trouble. I'd advise against that. If you have a site that sells widgets and hotdogs..breaking it up into 1 widget site and 1 hotdog site is a lot better.
Site A has been selling widgets and hotdogs for 2 years. It's difficult to break it up into 2 sites. Customers use to coming to the site and seeing all the products on the original site. What about if I have hotdogs on the 2nd site and widgets on a 3rd site? Would this help?
Hi there Yes. Make the design not "similar" but completly different. Different image names, different category names, different product name formulations (but maintaining an accurate title/description). At first i would advise to start with only 50 MAIN products. Not the whole 300 fleet. YOu could also add to this secondary shop, a few products that are NOT in the initial online store. THis would make your action, not one to SPAM the search engines, but a "commercial" one, ethiclly speaking. If you do as i said, you will not get penalised automaticlly. IF someone from Google, reads this post, and sees what you are tring to do, maybe yes Good luck.
Thanks for the reply. Your advice makes sense. It's also advisable not have any links from the main site?
If you make a second site that sells the same things as your first site you will want to make sure the sites are totally different in design and text content. You will want to make sure the registration information is different and I would go as far as having a different phone number if you have a 1-800 number. Make the site look like it is a diffenr company, owned and opperated by a differnt person. But having said this, I wouldn't make a second site. I would just optimize the one.
One more question. would it matter if the domain names are similiar? Would that trigger anything? Say if the main site is named: widgetshop.com. Is it okay to use a name like: widget-shop.com as the 2nd site. or am I better off choosing a name like super-widget-onlineshop.com and be totally different. Since we only have one 800 phone#, we like to have our operator answer the phone as "widget shop" and not having worry about the two names, make our administration a bit easier.
The domain name won't matter. Its the design and tagging you have to worry about. Definitely a good idea to design another site, but like everyone else has said, keep design completely different between the 2. You don't want to trip any filters.
I would not advise this similarity. This is my recommendation. Altough .. Your personalised phone could be put with no problem at all