Multiple Domain SEO Thought

[scig]

I had a my website, www.southerncoastins.com up for about a month. I contracted an expert to do me onsite and while we were discussing our plan of attack, I noticed that my website was just starting to appear on the first page of bing and yahoo, and just off the first for google, for some of the keywords I had been wanting (the phrases included the name of my city).

So at about the same time, 2 things happened. I added 2 domain names www.surfsidebeachautoinsurance, and www.insuringmyrtlebeach.com to point back to the original domain AND the SEO girl uploaded the optimized content/keywords/descriptions to my site.

IT seemed like right away my organic listing disappeared. went back the 5th page on google and 2nd and 3rd on yahoo and bing if I was lucky.

Until this morning, there were only 2 explinations. 1 is when she changed the content, she had no idea what she was doing and my website was doomed to remain hidden unless I changed it, or 2 is that it was reindexing itself after she made the changes and it would just be a matter of time.

But this morning I had another idea. I've read several times that the search engines punish sites for duplicate content. I noticed within a week of pointing these domains I would see two instances in the organic searches, one with one domain, and the other with the second or third. Is it possible that I need to do like a 301 redirect for the additional 2 domains or some other technique to tell the engines that these are the same sites? Or does this even matter?

 

[YouGotMyMoney]

this might be what they call the google dance

 

[somarco]

I am seeing something similar, except perhaps in reverse.

I have a good site with a lot of links that does well for key words and phrases. Recently I put up a 2nd site that is more focused on Medicare in hopes of building it up over the next year or so to an authoritative site.

Have not noticed any change in georgiainsuranceshop.com even though I have added new content for Medicare including posts on Medicare. Some of my links are directed to my Medicare site but have not seemed to produce the desired results.

I am getting good traffic for health insurance on my main site and even picking up a fair number of Medicare prospects and clients, but zilch from my Medicare site.

There is some duplicate content between the two sites, but not that much.

Just a wag on your site, but my guess would be the content changes on your initial site plus probably more pg 1 competition for your terms.

 

[ksigmtsu]

Duplicate images and links or even layouts do not appear to matter at all.

Duplicate text is bad.

 

[scig]

ahhhhh....just came across this, from katzwebservices.com, was written in 2008 so not sure if its still valid...

• Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show if your sites includes duplication. If you don’t want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.

 

[YouGotMyMoney]

I am getting good traffic for health insurance on my main site and even picking up a fair number of Medicare prospects and clients, but zilch from my Medicare site.

I think folks looking for medicare for the most part do not search using the terms related to medicare, instead they shop or google health insurance related terms more than medicare.

 

[somarco]

A quick and unscientific check with Dr. Google indicates the following search results.

Medicare supplement plan - 946,000
Medicare advantage plan - 5,690,000
health insurance for seniors - 20,600,000
senior health insurance - 37,600,000
Medicare - 41,500,000
health insurance - 88,900,000

My guess would be they start out broad then narrow the terms if they don't see what they want.

 

[YouGotMyMoney]

A quick and unscientific check with Dr. Google indicates the following search results.

Medicare supplement plan - 946,000
Medicare advantage plan - 5,690,000
health insurance for seniors - 20,600,000
senior health insurance - 37,600,000
Medicare - 41,500,000
health insurance - 88,900,000

My guess would be they start out broad then narrow the terms if they don't see what they want.

Are those broad search results?

If so my understanding with broad, is that a term for example "senior health insurance". it means that the terms "senior" "health" "insurance", those three words (not necessarily in that order) are searched 37 million times a month, but the exact search results for "senior health insurance" is 1k global monthly searches.

 

[Crabcake Johnny]

When using Google's keyword tool, on the right column you can click broad, exact for phrase.

When checking broad, "health insurance" is millions of searches. When you click "exact" it's only 200,000.

This is very telling when you type in for an exact search of "medicare supplement insurance" and see it's only searched 12,000 times a month.

This is why you really have to do a lot of research before targeting certain phrases. With my association, I was dreaming of the day when I'd rank number 1 for "health insurance training." Well, I do. And that would be great except it's only searched 170 times a month.

 

[YouGotMyMoney]

This is very telling when you type in for an exact search of "medicare supplement insurance" and see it's only searched 12,000 times a month.

actually it may be worse than that.

LOL

that same keyword using only local search volume (USA), it comes up 2400 searches a month.

"Medicare Supplemental Insurance" comes up at 12,100.