Duplicate site advice

[benners]

I’d appreciate suggestions on how best to handle this SEO project.

I have a new SEO client who has two duplicate e-commerce sites on the same C class IP range, call them site1.co.uk and site2.co.uk, and he’s just built another site using new e-commerce software and is hosting it on site1.com

Site1.co.uk has a product range of 1500 and gets good long tail traffic which seems to convert fairly well and scores well for some top level search terms. These rankings are achieved mainly because the site has been around since 2000.

The duplicate site2.co.uk has a reduced but identical product range as site1.co.uk and gets much less traffic and has been live since 2004.

The new site1.com domain was purchased by the client in 2006 and only recently has the new site on it. This site has a duplicate product range to site1.co.uk but has a different design template.

I suggested to the client that we replaced outdated site1.co.uk with site1.com and do some .htaccess 301 redirects from the highest ranking page no site1.co.uk to the new equivalent pages. The client wasn’t keen to mess with this site as it achieves a good level of traffic and sales. The conclusion we came to was to point site1.com to site1.co.uk and replace the poor ranking site on site2.co.uk with the new e-commerce site. This way the new site benefits from the age of site2.co.uk

Does anyone have any other suggestions on how to approach this?

If I go ahead as above, the new e-commerce site will be on a different IP to the identical content site currently getting good traffic on site1.co.uk. Does it matter that the product descriptions are identical? I know the general answer to this is ‘yes’, but there will be many e-commerce sites selling the same product and will be using the manufacturers product description.

Many thanks.

[jimbeetle]

I suggested to the client that we replaced outdated site1.co.uk with site1.com and do some .htaccess 301 redirects from the highest ranking page no site1.co.uk to the new equivalent pages.
Why would you ever want to do this? Take down an 8-year-old, well-performing site? Your client was quite right to reject your advice.

The site2.co.uk isn't ever go to perform well as long as it's basically a dupe. Repurpose it to something else (not duped content), being sure to try to keep any incoming link juice it might have.

Then simply point the dot com version to the site1.co.uk version to capture any type-in traffic. Don't dupe any content. If you already have a well-performing site you don't won't to mess around with it too much.

[benners]

Thanks for your comments Jim.

The reason for considering a replacement of the high ranking site with the new e-commerce site is because the current site is very out dated, very restrictive and certainly loosing sales because of this.

Why are you suggesting this should not be considered? Is there some thing wrong with the technique I suggested of redirecting currently indexed pages to the new equivalents? The new equivalents will be better from an seo perspective so if the redirects maintain the link juice it should result in better rankings shouldn't it?

[jimbeetle]

"Outdated" can be taken care of, but you really can't replace the age of the domain as an important trust factor. How important, well, nobody really knows, but important enough that I wouldn't throw it away.

I'd say that if you're going to take the trouble to build a new site and redirect from the old to the new, that you might as well do all that within the old site itself.

Then, if the new pages are actually better than the old, you should get the best of both worlds.

[AussieWebmaster]

I would just redesign the old site but keep the old content - you can drop it in to new template... keeping title tags and other meta data same as old. Then design a new site with all new content for the .com site thus possibly getting ranking for those pages.
Take the second site and redirect all pages to appropriate pages to the new .com site.
Move the 2 site to a new server for the redirect - by changing dns you do not lose the link juice of site 2 and it does not appear as a possible doorway site.

[benners]

Jim, the new site would be replacing the current site1.co.uk so there would be no loss of age. The .htaccess 301 redirects would be all on the same site, just to the new equivalent pages.

Would it be practical or possible to redirect 1500 pages to the equivalent new pages using .htaccess? Is this too many?

If Google has indexed old-product1.htm and I do a 301 redirect to new-product1.htm what would Google show as the page name in the SERPS?

AussieWebmaster, the client is using EC Builder which seems to be very restrictive in terms of design and flexibility. I haven't studied documentation so it perhaps could be improved.

[jimbeetle]

Okay, guess this is what confused me:

I suggested to the client that we replaced outdated site1.co.uk with site1.com and do some .htaccess 301 redirects from the highest ranking page no site1.co.uk to the new equivalent pages.
Sounded like you were going to nuke the older site. Upon re-reading, it still does.

Would it be practical or possible to redirect 1500 pages to the equivalent new pages using .htaccess? Is this too many?
It should be quite practical and doable, especially if you keep your eye to the redirection as you develop the new site structure.

If Google has indexed old-product1.htm and I do a 301 redirect to new-product1.htm what would Google show as the page name in the SERPS?
If everything goes smoothly the search engines will not see the old pages. In a short time they should pick up the content of the new pages.

But, do you actually have to change the page names? Can you try to keep them the same? Or is the entire structure going to change?

[benners]

Sorry for not being clear.

The current product pages are like this "itm00938.htm" and the new ones would be "product-title.html" so I think it would be worth doing the redirect.

[AussieWebmaster]

Sorry for not being clear.

The current product pages are like this "itm00938.htm" and the new ones would be "product-title.html" so I think it would be worth doing the redirect.
absolutely but make sure you do 301 redirects for the old pages to the new ones

[expertsguy]

Hi,

I think that may be the cause of the site site error if have the duplicate site.

Thanks.....