As of right now they both point to the same IP and are the exact same. They have different page rank, but since they are identical only one or the other is in the SERPs for some reason (they flip flop the lower ranked one is higher most of the time because of links I think)
Anyway, I have a pretty bad conversion rate. I just checked and for the last 30 full days I had about 31,000 visitors. Of which I had 36 orders. Although widgets aren't exactly a small ticket item these days ($75-$1000), that is a crappy rate.
Here is my though. I point widgetersupply.com to a directory of the same server so I can still use the same database for all of my customers that are signed up and the same information for the products...but I do a facelift and make it very minimal as far as graphics. I think I am loosing a lot of people in load times and Netscape 4.0 users who don't realize that their software is 5 years old.
Anybody done this? Problems with search engines? Problems with confused customers? Any comments?
A company I know just got a pr0 for doing precisely this.
They had the sites on different servers, with different IPs (completely different IP blocks).
If you do it, you'll need to make the sites as different as possible - content, layout, file names, link structure etc - and don't link them to each other.
So if I have the same 100 word description within 1000 word page on one site and a 300 word page on another site will it count that as duplicate content? How picky are the search engines?
