Hi there,

Got a problem I'm struggling to find a solution to and hope you guys can come up with some ideas.

I'm in the process of building out a Woocommerce site for a customer so they can move away from Volusion. This will be the main site and all purchases are to be run through this site.

They also have a second site with a different domain name. This is an old html site that has been going for years but is ranking well because of its age and organic SEO. This just contains images of the products and links back to the product page on the main site.

Ideally, the customer wants to renew this site with a clone of the main site. It would then redirect any purchases to the main site. The idea being that if any changes were made to the main site, we could just clone and reload a copy to the second site and activate catalogue mode rather than duplicate any changes made.

The issue here is how we could get the second site to redirect to the first site without adding individual links to each product (which would need to be re-done every time the site was overwritten).

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate the input :-)

 

Is there a reason to keep them separate? Why is the main site on a different URL?

It's just what the customer wants. The main site has always been the e-commerce whereas the second site (which has been running since way before they went onto e-commerce) just has static pages that link images to product pages on the main site. However, the second site is the one that is ranking on page one on Google searches so they want to keep it. It is just a plain html site and non-responsive so needs updating soon. Basically, I'm just looking at options to keep (preferably) a matching site on both URL's but without having to make changes twice.

If you or anyone else can think of any different solutions, I'm all ears 🙂

Hmm, my main concern is essentially two identical sites, see Duplicate Content. Running canonical could work but it'll blend the two into one (not what they want) which might as well be done with a merger.

Edit: Have you investigate other reasons why one site outranks the other?

Edited January 21, 20197 yr by BrowserBugs

To be honest, no. I'm not so hot on the SEO side as they have separate people doing that. I assume it is more down to organic growth as the second site has been around longer than the main e-commerce site (it was just a catalogue site initially and they added links when they built the e-commerce site). I suppose it's also a good source of backlinks as well.

In honesty, I'm open to ideas. If it doesn't involve the sites being identical but the second site could automatically be populated with any new products, that could work as well.

Sharing the data across 2 sites is easy enough, just connect the old site to the database of the online shop and they will be in sync. The question of "is it a good idea" should be raised with whoever is looking after the SEO for both projects, I'm sure they'd like to know and would advise you.

A little relevant story was I was asked to investigate a site which wasn't ranking. On investigation I found that not only did they have mainsite.com but also an identical clone under dev.mainsite.com, and in addition they were also trying to populate anotherdomain.com with the same content linking bookings to mainsite.com/bookings. So more than 3 distinct urls serving the same content, this mess caused a right pickle, all three sites were on the decline.

Edited January 21, 20197 yr by BrowserBugs

Gotcha. So basically it would be better to just re-create the old second site on a responsive platform and bite the bullet and make amendments whenever a new product was added or a price changed? Had a feeling this wouldn't be easy 🙂

7 minutes ago, Gaz1 said:

Gotcha. So basically it would be better to just re-create the old second site on a responsive platform and bite the bullet and make amendments whenever a new product was added or a price changed? Had a feeling this wouldn't be easy 🙂

If they have their heart set on 2 sites then this is the only way it could work, but make sure old site has unique information vs new site. If all the products on old site are identical (or closely hashed) content this is when the search engine questions the legitimacy. It's entirely possible that the old site ranks and the new online shop doesn't because search engines think the shop is scraping the content from the old site. The days of multiple websites serving the same content are long gone, a lot of comparison sites got a right kick up the rear over this very issue.

If it were me I would open up Google Analytics and Search Console for both domains and take a peek into the state of each noting content, average positions and linking domains - but don't count old site as back links to new in this case. Unless there is a considerable reason not to join the two I would migrate one site into the other, but just my 2 pence worth as usual.

The static site wasn't so much copied content. It was essentially a collection of category pages with 10-20 product images which had a link to the actual product page on the main e-commerce site. They ideally wanted it to look the same on both sites but with purchasing only being handled by one. If it ain't gonna work or it will just cause issues, better off just re-creating the old format on a responsive site.

I've got someone who does purely SEO so will ask them to have a look at the analytics side and take it from there I think.

Thanks for the input though, really appreciate it 🙂