Questions about Linking Domains & Google Guidelines

[stuff4beauty2]

Hi all,

About 9 months ago, we built http://www.stuff4beauty.com using html and built all 950 pages by raw hand coding.

BTW..... We took the criticism of the site in the building stages from our fellow WPW members with an open mind, but did our own thing anyway and carried on with the building of the site.

The site is finally finished, and has been for many months. It is doing much better than expected. We are 100% happy with it and the amount of business we receive from it. The only thing we frowned upon was the fact it does not have a database, and is hard to update, add and/or change pages.

Since building it we learned about programming and PHP (wish we knew it all before) and so we obtained another domain http://www.getsalonproducts.com to be able to have the ability to add new products and delete discontinued products with ease.

We have a solid Google PR of 4 on our home page of stuff4beauty and a lot of the sub pages and show on the first page for many of our product keywords. The 2 sites share the same shopping cart.


Our questions are set as follows and we are very concerned:

1. If we link the new site to the old site in places only where it is needed to get customers to the new products, will it effect our Google ranking?

2. Can we get banned for doing this?


3. Will Google consider the sites to go against the guideline:

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.


We do not want to jeopardize our standings in google on the stuff4beauty site, yet want to be able to get the new products in front of the customers easily without having to go through raw editing.
From what we are reading, using redirects would get us in trouble, so we just directly linked to the pages on the new site.
The existing site does not carry the new products, so it is not duplicate content, although the new site will have mostly all the same products as the existing site, except set up in a different look and format. Each site is on a different server and are completely separate domains.

Thanks ahead and we appreciate all input and answers to these questions

[greeneagle]

stuff4beauty2

As long as you are not hosting one or the other under the same domain as a subdomain and maintain different content it will probably not become a detrimental issue.

They are already linked up anyway - How long?

Ken

[stuff4beauty2]

They are each hosted by entirely different hosting companies and both totally seperate domains. We linked them together about 2 weeks ago. We felt it necessary because of the shared shopping cart. Wouldn't this be like linking to a competitor's site and them linking back?

Different content -----

Most all of the products are the same, but will be presented differently, is that different content?

We are very concerned and do not want to risk our google ranking and if need be, as an option we could not link the sites, but create an explanation in "about us" about the shared shopping cart and new products. But on the other hand, if linking the new site for the new products on the old site , it would be much nicer for the customers.

Any other opinions would be so appreciated. We have read many posts about sites get penalized by google, we would do whatever it takes to not be one of those statistics. We want to be certain that what we are doing is OK, wish we could ask google... then we'd know for sure!

[stuff4beauty2]

Would anyone please look and tell us if these 2 sites are against the google guidelines -


Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.


www.stuff4beauty.com
www.getsalonproducts.com

[Duncan Pollock]

Well, for my money you're putting yourself at some risk. Indeed, I can't readily understand why you have to have two sites that are, for all practical purposes, mirrors of each other.
I'd strongly advise you to merge them into one. I mean, if it's possible for visitors to either site to order from the same shopping cart, then why can't you restructure everything so they can simply place an order on the one (and only) site?
Moreover, if your instinct is driving you into asking the question, perhaps it's unconsciously telling you the answer!

Duncan

[stuff4beauty2]

Thanks for the input, and you are right. I do question it. I was told by the company that I hired it is OK to build another site. He was going to initially redesign stuff4beauty because of the criticism I received on WPW about stuff4beauty when I asked for a site review. The redesign evolved into a new domain being built and was supposed to be done in a month. Four months later, still not even half way finished. Not happy.
Stuff4beauty has 950 pages and all hand coded. I have so much work into it I would not want to throw it away, but wanted a way to add the upcoming new products with ease instead of raw editing. I thought it was a good idea to add another site that I could edit and tie together with no intentions of getting in hot water with google which has not happened yet. I read a lot and was reading about banned and penalized sites and started to worry about this situation. I think maybe I will do away with GetSalonProducts, not even have it. I suppose adding a shopping cart script on stuff4beauty to add new products would be a solution As to the way it looks and those who criticised it, would not believe how fantastic the site does. Much better than we ever expected. The look does not bother our customers one bit and if we lost any customers because of the cosmetics of the site, we sure don't feel it and it does not seem to bother google. Thanks again - you have helped us in the past also!

[Keimos]

Hi stuff4beauty2,

My advice would be to get a program like dreamweaver etc and change the file names of the lesser ranked site so that the file names do not mirror each other and at the same time change certain content by rephrasing certain text.

As previously stated you have a mirror site but two different IP addresses so technically you should not be spamming but unfortunately computers only see black and white.

Basically change something between the two, however small, to make the difference.

And congrats for hand coding the site. A lot of time and effort. You have found PHP now find WYSIWYG. It may not be pure but it is a lot faster and you can still hand code to repair any damage that has been generated.

Our site is developing but I can change change links in 5 mins or less and with CSS I can change the look even quicker.

[stuff4beauty2]

Keimos, thank-you very much. You are the first person to recognize the hard work put into this site. Most people do not build sites like this anymore, I now realize that, but it is here to stay. It has paid off and we do not want to do anything to hurt it. We have simply added a php catalog on the site for the newly added products, does anyone think this would be a problem in the search engines crawling the site?

I do not think we will do anything with the other site at all, it is not worth it. Now we can add new products and deleting discontinued products or making price changes on html is really not a big deal. Thanks again!