How To Improve Rankings When Site Owner Duplicates Their Own Web Site

[Jeff Sundin]

A client asked me to build a simple web site that would offer plastic products for sale. Their parent company already has a website Minnesota Diversified Industries (MDI): Quality manufacturing of corrugated plastic products that performed poorly as a sales tool for his purposes and he wanted a separate site geared more toward the individual products with less emphasis on the company.

I suggested a new domain name PLastic Totes, Plastics Containers, Plastic Sheets, Corrugated Shipping Products, Plastic Decoys and Plastic Wildlife Blind Material. MDI Sells Plastic he agreed and we soon discovered that the parent comapnay already owned this name along with several others. After a bit of corporate wrangling, they agreed to give me an ftp location on their server to publish the site. I uploaded the site and immediately found it coming up as PLastic Totes, Plastics Containers, Plastic Sheets, Corrugated Shipping Products, Plastic Decoys and Plastic Wildlife Blind Material. MDI Sells Plastic instead of .com

I was concerned, contacted the company etc.......I'm not really sure why they did this, but initially the site came up well in searches and it did generate some sales traffic so there was no apparent problem. Now the search performance has dropped off and so have the sales calls. According to Google, (our site) mdiplastcs.com has no pages indexed and I see no indication that it's been crawled since I submitted the sitemap back in February.

Is it too early to be concerned? or is the duplicated site under the .org domain causing problems?

[alhefner]

Hmmmm....Your pages should have been indexed by now if your URL is present in the DNS system. From doing a direct search for your URL, no results were returned for that site! That idicates to me that the domain is not in the DNS system.

I just looked for the domain name and found that it isn not even registered! Anyone could grab it at this time.

[Jeff Sundin]

Yes the domain name(s) mdiplastics.com and .org are both owned by the parent company. The website shows up under both .com and .org on the internet, but if you find them in a search on google it will take you to the .org domain.

[incrediblehelp]

Jeff yes having multiple websites with the same content is an issue. Why not just 301 redirect one to another? I am not sure where the question is above.

[edhan]

Both of the two sites are having identical content is likely to be the cause. I do believe that it will be advisable to use 301 for one of the site or revamp with new content instead of direct duplication.

[Good Tidings Nautical]

I agree a 301 redirect would be the way to go. I have had my redirect site for nautical gifts rank higher than my main site and a blank cache would appear. Go Figure!

[alan]

Hello if you click on the contact us link it takes you to here http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...V4&id=42675112

[RemodelingGuy]

I have just been stung with this issue.

During the October - December re-index of my site, my site at StartRemodeling.com got penalized for the link crud and went from a PR6 to a 4 and my other site, that while it definately not a Copy of SR, it has a lot of the same content I have written or published over the years.

It went from a PR4 to a 2 now.

Bummer.

Can someone explain in a little more detail what the 301 re-direct thing is?

I could also use a little info on how to implement the no-follow.

Thanks in advance.

[naman]

The only solution to get rid from copyscape is to place unique content in the page. If you are using the unique and relevant content then it would be easier to get better SERP from both similar layout sites.

[RemodelingGuy]

I didn't duplicate it because I was trying to cheat.

At one time, I wanted to seperate mold from home improvement, but I am getting so many hits to the content on StartRemodeling.com that ToxicMoldUSA.com has become secondary.

But it would be a shame to let a site that has some decent search engine placement to die.

I think a 301 may be the answer.

[Jeff Sundin]

Thank you for the help, I know that the duplicate content is an issue and that's why I posed the original question here. I know this is tricky because as the customer, they own the server and all of the domain names. All I have really done is create a simple web site.

Let me re-cap and re-phrase the question.

I published only the .com site to an ftp location on their company server. For reasons of their own, they set up the duplicate .org site. I'm not sure how they do it, but whenever I change content and publish, their copy site instantly updates and contains all of my changes. In other words, they allow me no way from my end to create unique content.

Is there anything I can do to separate the two sites to prevent their duplicate from ruining the search performance?

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by Jeff Sundin

Is there anything I can do to separate the two sites to prevent their duplicate from ruining the search performance?

Sure ask them to stop duplicating and start 301 redirecting one to another. What is the puzzle here?

[dean]

This is interesting. If you set up multiple domains with nameservers pointing to the same website, like a domain.com and a domain.org, how do you tell search engines which one to index? I think you can specify a preferred one in google webmaster tools, but what about the other search engines? I think the 301 is the obvious thing, but are there other things you can do besides a 301 redirect to the preferred domain?

[Jeff Sundin]

My problem is that I only have access to the .com site and nothing else. They control the domain names and server.

The re-directs need to be set up on their end. They are either unwilling or do not have the expertise.

I've discussed buying a new domain name and using an independent hosting provider, but then I still have the problem of all that duplicate content on the original site and it's copy along with the normal problems of getting the new name recognized.

[incrediblehelp]

Well if they are unwilling to make the modifications necessary to achieve your goals why are you working with them? This is all very confusing.

[mdiadmin]

Hello, please allow me to chime in here. I am the web site administrator of the web site that Jeff Sundin is referring to. First of all he stated that we have duplicate sites. We do not.
Here is what we have.
One physical web server and ip address.
We have 4 domain names registered with network solutions
They are mdiplastic.com, mdiplastics.com, mdiplastic.org and mdiplastics.org and they all point to the same web server address.
We use IIS and host headers so all 4 of these domain names point to the same folder on our web server. There is only one folder or website for plastics. There is no duplicate. This is the folder that Jeff has access to update.

We also have our corporate web site on the same server. The domain name is mdi.org
Again we use IIS with a host header that directs mdi.org to a different folder or Web Site "if you will" on the same server.

We are willing to make whetever modifications are necessary but want to be sure you were accurately informed on our setup.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by mdiadmin

We use IIS and host headers so all 4 of these domain names point to the same folder on our web server. There is only one folder or website for plastics. There is no duplicate. This is the folder that Jeff has access to update.

OK then that is the problem then. You are letting the search engines decide which domain to show in the search engine results pages. I can create a post on my blog today and link to all 4 versions. Google will crawl all 4 links and then decide on their own which is the primary and then potentially filter the rest. MSN and Yahoo could be worse with duplicate content, but I wont get into that now.

So the next step is decide which on is the primary and then 301 redirect the other three to it like has been suggested 5 times before in this thread.

Matching 4 domains to one IP will always potentially cause this problem because you cant control how people link to you if you offer them 4 different domains to do so.

[mdiadmin]

Since I only have a single physical web site; does that mean I need to set up 3 dummy web sites for each of the other addresses and 301 redirect to the real site?

[mdiadmin]

Nevermind. I just created one dummy site and used it to redirect all the other addresses to the main site. Thanks for your help.

[incrediblehelp]

Checked all of them. Looks like you are set up correctly.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by Jeff Sundin

My problem is that I only have access to the .com site and nothing else. They control the domain names and server.

The re-directs need to be set up on their end. They are either unwilling or do not have the expertise.

I've discussed buying a new domain name and using an independent hosting provider, but then I still have the problem of all that duplicate content on the original site and it's copy along with the normal problems of getting the new name recognized.

If they do not have the expertise, invite them here and we will explain them howto.

[janeth]

The site with the most links win.

The more links the more the site will get crawled and Google will pick the site with the most links and ignore the other one.

I have a client that does the same thing and it does not affect what we do at all.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by janeth

The site with the most links win.

The more links the more the site will get crawled and Google will pick the site with the most links and ignore the other one.

Not true at all. The backlinks are not a quanitative thing, it is about quality more than quantity.

[janeth]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Not true at all. The backlinks are not a quanitative thing, it is about quality more than quantity.

Excuse me, the site with the most QUALITY backlinks win. I'd almost thing you'd know me well enough to know what I meant.

[incrediblehelp]

Janeth I think I knew what you meant just trying to be clear for all the others reading. Thanks for your comments as always.

[Janna122003]

Originally Posted by Jeff Sundin

A client asked me to build a simple web site that would offer plastic products for sale. Their parent company already has a website Minnesota Diversified Industries (MDI): Quality manufacturing of corrugated plastic products that performed poorly as a sales tool for his purposes and he wanted a separate site geared more toward the individual products with less emphasis on the company.

I suggested a new domain name PLastic Totes, Plastics Containers, Plastic Sheets, Corrugated Shipping Products, Plastic Decoys and Plastic Wildlife Blind Material. MDI Sells Plastic he agreed and we soon discovered that the parent comapnay already owned this name along with several others. After a bit of corporate wrangling, they agreed to give me an ftp location on their server to publish the site. I uploaded the site and immediately found it coming up as PLastic Totes, Plastics Containers, Plastic Sheets, Corrugated Shipping Products, Plastic Decoys and Plastic Wildlife Blind Material. MDI Sells Plastic instead of .com

I was concerned, contacted the company etc.......I'm not really sure why they did this, but initially the site came up well in searches and it did generate some sales traffic so there was no apparent problem. Now the search performance has dropped off and so have the sales calls. According to Google, (our site) mdiplastcs.com has no pages indexed and I see no indication that it's been crawled since I submitted the sitemap back in February.

Is it too early to be concerned? or is the duplicated site under the .org domain causing problems?

Suggest them to rewrite all the contents of the site to be unique.

[janeth]

Originally Posted by Janna122003

Suggest them to rewrite all the contents of the site to be unique.

It would not matter because the second it was loaded onto the server it would show up on the other domian name.

[Jeff Sundin]

Janeth, You are correct. Every change I made showed up under the other domain(s) instantly, so there was no way to get any unique content anywhere on the site.

[janeth]

Originally Posted by Jeff Sundin

Janeth, You are correct. Every change I made showed up under the other domain(s) instantly, so there was no way to get any unique content anywhere on the site.

I would start working on links.

[vinay11111]

Thanks what a nice informative discussion. I have one question here:

Pointing different domains to same IP cause duplicate content problems but what about parked domains say if I park my main domain to all rest three


Thanks in advance @!@!!!

[janeth]

Parking the name does not hurt anything.

[vinay11111]

Originally Posted by janeth

Parking the name does not hurt anything.

Thanks. I was in doubt regarding this.

[edhan]

I feel it is a waste to park your domain. It is to me like not having the domain name at all since it is doing nothing.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by edhan

I feel it is a waste to park your domain. It is to me like not having the domain name at all since it is doing nothing.

Maybe domain age for later use?

[edhan]

Yes. I do not deny that fact of aging does come into use. But practically, I like to build the domain with quality content slowly instead of parking it. That way, I will have the advantage of having the site optimizing for SEO as it ages. That way will have more benefits, right?