Company launching new e-commerce site with similar content

Sirs,

I have been running an e-commerce website for several years now and achieve good SERP positioning. I have purchased a new domain with the intention of setting up a site selling similar products, under the same company name. Whilst the top level domain is different I am worried about the following and would really appreciate any advice:

1. although I will be selling different products, under different categories, some pages will be very similar e.g. the Terms and Conditions of trade, the Company address and information, How to Buy, etc etc. Will I be punished for having content that is not unique?

2. the coding beneath the website i.e. the HTML and layout etc, will be the same. I am using the same "package" (albeit one I wrote) to serve each domain.

3. will I be punished for linking the two websites? I was going have a link on every page to the second site from the first, and from the first to the second.

4. I have a handful of products on the first site that I wish to have on the second site. I intend to duplicate that content on the second site, but also remove the content from the first, placing a 302 redirect in the htaccess file. Is the 302 route the best solution? And will I be punished from the off for just moving the content, or should I edit it to make it different?

5. I should say that both domains are hosted by the same company, so the first half of the IP address is the same, but the second half is different. Will this matter in the whole equation??

I really appreciate any help. Thank you in advance.
Andy

Then at the top of those pages place -
This tells the search engines to not index the page and follow any link off the page. This will get rid of this issue, but I wouldn't worry about it TBH.

Again I wouldn't worry about it just make sure that the content is differnt and try to make the content have a higher ratio than code.

3 and 5 I would say toghter maybe as this may look like a beggining of a mininet. What you can do is link them toghter and then add the rel="nofollow" attribute to the a tag. The search engines then wont follow the link but this will allow your site visitors to.

I would personally make the IP's different and then link them.


Ok now this is the main problem I would say because by duplicating it it will flag up a duplicate content issue on the new site.

Now there are several ways to get around it.
Soltion 1.
You can give the pages on the old site a 404 header this will tell the search engines over time that the pages have gone, a 302 redirect tells them that it has temporaily moved not been deleted. Then on the new site place the meta no index on the corresponding pages.

When you are sure the other pages have been removed from the index then delete the meta noindex and the search enignes will index the content with no issues.

Solution 2.
If you want your site visitors to follow the links from one site to the other redirect the search engines by placing a 301 on the old pages to the new pages this, over time, will tell the search engines the content has moved again getting rid of the duplicate content issue.

Solution 3.
301 the old pages to the category page on the old site. This will pass equity to the site from those pages and any site visitors will be re-directed to relevant products rather than receiving a this page cant be found.

Then place the content on the new site. I would still add the meta for a few weeks on the new site though just to be on the safe side.


I wouldn't say that was going to be an issue TBH, I would still ask the server company to place the new site on a differnt server though, but check this your self and don't just go on their word.

Jaz

Whats the use of robots.txt. Ive seen articles mentioning it but would the person simply create the file and have it in the meta tags? Or is there something to input in that file

Yes the files could be disallowed with a entry in the robots.txt file, however adding the meta does the same. TBH a entry in the robots.txt file will still return the results in the SERP's be it with no page decsription and just the pages url but the problem with this is technically the page can still apply equity, this is not what you want.

The meta noindex on the other hand doesn't return the site in the index at all but also passes the equity on to other pages and does not store it on the page which is better.

Now a robots.txt file is simply a txt file located in the root directory.

In that text file you have a User-agent, not sure of the correct name so I'm going to call it directive, directive. This states which bots get the preceding rules.

The following lines then tell the search engines what to ignore or to view if you have a file in a blocked directory that you still want indexed.

So for example place in the robots.txt file -
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /script/
Allow: /script/index.php

This tells all search engines, user-agent: *, to not index the script directory or the image directory but to index the index.php file that is contained within the script directory.

Now you can give specfic rules to each search engine. For example:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /images/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /script/

Now all the search engines will not index the script directory but only Google will also not index the image directory aswell.

Now you can use wildcards aswell.
A rule of -
Disallow: /*?sessionid

Will mean any url with ?sessionid in will not be indexed.

Now a couple of things to mention
- Allow can bring some dodgy results and does not always work accross all the search engines.
- The wildcard as far as I know, I have no need for it so haven't checked, is only supported in Yahoo and Google.
- A rule of -
Disallow: /
will block your whole site from being indexed.
- Also it has been reported that blocking a directory with the trailing slash can bring some werid results in Google at least.
To get around this you can use
Disallow: /images

This does the same job but will disallow any url that has /images in it regardless if it is the directory.

For example.
yoursite/images-for-your-other-half-on-valentines-day
yoursite/images/somefile

Will both be blocked.

Hope that helps.
Jaz