How to Set Up Multiple Website Versions Safely
A problem encountered by many international companies and organisations is how to create several regional websites which have substantially similar content.
But first let's identify what the actual problem is...
Let's assume that 'Company X' has an English language website under a .com domain and operates from the UK. But over 50% of their traffic is coming from North America. Due to the high shipping charges for sending goods to the US, customer conversion of this traffic is very low - less than 0.1% in fact. Company X decides therefore that it makes sense to set up a US branch and create a US regional website - thus cashing in on the 40,000+ US visitors that they receive each month but to whom they fail to sell successfully.
Setting up a regional website operating under a .us domain suffix should be no problem, but Company X wishes to use much of the same content as exists on their international website. Their biggest source of traffic is from Google who themselves claim to dislike multiple sites sharing the same content. Google quotes:
"Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content."
(http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html)
Splitting a site into two or more regional versions which have substantially similar content makes sense in many ways, but the crucial issue is whether Google will ban one or more of these sites, causing a substantial loss of valuable website traffic.
So what to do?
The first point to realise is that sharing content is one of the most accepted and bona fide practices taking place on the Internet today. See Glen Murray's excellent article 'The Rise and Rise of Article PR' for an overview of this subject. If Google were really to ban websites which shared their content, some of the most respected sites on the 'Net would disappear from Google's index and the whole ethos of sharing information would be undermined.
Google's endeavour is therefore I believe to deter website owners from operating multiple domain names all of which point to the same website. This was a practice that was rife up until 2-3 years ago and was certainly a 'black hat' technique. But Google have gone further than this by claiming that they will also ban 'substantially similar' sites, even if they are operating under their own independent domain names. Fear not.
What Google is looking for is almost identical site versions. This takes into account the entire code on your web pages i.e. not just the text that you can read via your web browser. Make sure that each of your regional websites have a different design layout. Copy and pasting your main content into these pages will then ensure that your code is substantially different from your other sites.
Planning your new website relationships may require making a decision about which of the sites you promote to the search engines. Search engine marketing is expensive and/or time consuming so you may want to focus your marketing efforts on just one of your sites and then provide your visitors with a choice of which regional site they want to purchase from.
Let's assume therefore that Company A decides to optimise only its .com website for the search engines. This should be coded in simple HTML and is an information site with links to regional sales sites. So if they have US (.us) and Canadian (.ca) regional sites these will will be programmed in pHp. Again, porting content pages from HTML to pHp will in itself result in a substantially different set of pages - unlikely to therefore to cause problems with Google.
Following the above guidelines is unlikely to leave you at risk of being banned. However, you would be wise to take some extra precautions. Make sure that your websites are hosted under separate IP addresses. If you have several sites it may be feasible to set up a dedicated server which will enable you to host all of your sites on one server but assign independent IP addresses to each domain name. If you are interested in this option contact me for recommendations on how to do this cost effectively.
Also, if you consider that two or more of your websites are 'substantially similar' and are at risk of being banned by Google, make a decision about which site is most important to you and then use your robots.txt file on the sites that you do not want to be indexed to instruct the search robots to ignore these pages. To disallow ALL spiders from indexing one of your sites use the following code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
To disallow only the Googlebot from crawling your site use the following:
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
If you make sensible decisions now about your company or organisation's website relationships you will stand yourself in good stead for the forseeable future, saving yourself a lot of wasted time and money - as well as the frustration of finding your website suddenly dropped from the search engines.
Successful planning and implementation of a multiple website strategy will serve your customers better at a local level and will undoubtedly increase your overall conversion rates.
Simon Bowen, www.fluidstate.com
