search engine-eering

[PJ]

hello folks.

i re-designed a small site for a client a couple of months back that seems
to be doing the opposite of what it was intended to do - bring him more
business.

the main site had gone thru several changes, most recent from a site that
sold food supplements to a site that sells small electronic appliances. we
pared the site down to a simple 2-page site - got rid of all extra baggage,
so all it has is a product page and an order page on a secure server.

our search engine strategy involved purchasing a new domain containing
important keywords for the products and setting up an identical 2-page site
on the new domain which also pointed to the secure order page. We worked on
optimizing the <TITLE> and <META> tags of both sites.

Anyway, we thought this might perk up their sales, but sales actually
decreased drastically.

I am not sure where we went wrong. If anyone has any feedback or advice for
this issue with regard to search engines, please let me know!!

thanks..

pJ

 

[Michael Wilcox]

our search engine strategy involved purchasing a new domain containing
important keywords for the products and setting up an identical
2-page site on the new domain which also pointed to the secure order
page. We worked on optimizing the <TITLE> and <META> tags of both
sites.

Were you duplicating your site to have two entries in a search engine? If
so, engines like Google can detect ploys like those and will drop you from
their database.

 

[PJ]

our second domain (one with better keywords) was chosen to replace the 1st
domain. since some of our previous customers were used to the old domain,
we thought we'd leave them both up simultaneously. this means two almost
identical websites up under two different domain names.

do search engines consider this an infraction? if so, is there any
workaround for this, because we really need to keep both domains up - at
least for a few months until business transfers over to the new one.

thanks,

PJ

 

[Mark Parnell]

Sometime around Tue, 18 Nov 2003 02:08:39 GMT, PJ is reported to have
stated:

our second domain (one with better keywords) was chosen to replace the 1st
domain. since some of our previous customers were used to the old domain,
we thought we'd leave them both up simultaneously. this means two almost
identical websites up under two different domain names.

What are you talking about? Oh, this is a reply to an earlier post? Please
quote the relevant parts of what you are replying to.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~wijnands/nnq/nquote.html

do search engines consider this an infraction? if so, is there any
workaround for this, because we really need to keep both domains up - at
least for a few months until business transfers over to the new one.

Yes - it is considered spam. With only 2 domains it is borderline, but
still possible. Is either site listed at all in Google? If not, you have
been penalised for spamming. If they are, but they just aren't ranking
well, I would say it is just that the new site hasn't yet got the links etc
that the old one did.

When changing domains the best method is to send a 301 - Moved Permanently
in your http headers. How to do this depends on your server.

 

[Adrienne]

our second domain (one with better keywords) was chosen to replace the
1st domain. since some of our previous customers were used to the old
domain, we thought we'd leave them both up simultaneously. this means
two almost identical websites up under two different domain names.

do search engines consider this an infraction? if so, is there any
workaround for this, because we really need to keep both domains up -
at least for a few months until business transfers over to the new one.

thanks,

PJ

Sites with the same content will definately get you removed. You should be
doing a server side redirect (301 - moved permanently) to the new site, and
put a notice stating that users should update their bookmarks, etc.