More hits are on the worse site of two

The less professional of two sites I maintain is getting more hits.Change?

[broniusm]

Of two sites I'm maintaining for the same company, the more attractive, professional one is getting less hits. In fact, on a good search phrase, the crummier site is #2 in Google, second only to a more attractive competitor, and I fear visitors never get to see the "professional" looking site.

I'd like to improve the company's first impression by replacing the well-ranked, unattractive site, but I fear losing such a high ranking!

Anyone have any thoughts to share here?

(btw: other than the difference in design/look, the main reason for two sites is the main company site has been optimized for one set of keywords, and the uglier, product-specific site is op for another, more applicable set of keywords)

[jbinbpt]

Ugly sells. No one knows why.

jb

[jbinbpt]

It's actually more than ugly sells. I learned the hard way to get other opinions on site design and usability before. What looked good to me, did not work for others.

What you are calling "Less professional" may be easier for people to navigate. It's all about the target audience. We, as designers, might not be the best judge of our own work.

Web people are the worst people to have shop on line at Christmas time. I spent 30 minutes on the website of a large chain store today, getting NOWHERE. It was the slickest site I had seen in a long time, but I couldn’t find what I wanted. Now that I am home, I feeling bad about the very long email I sent ranting about usability and design. I am sure they are very proud of their work.

jb

[nakulgoyal]

I have seen VERY............................LOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG Auction Pages / Sales Pages and Landing Pages especially for ebooks and some softwares like that. They sell that's why they exist. Don't know if people read that alll...but seems yes.

[edited by: pageoneresults at 4:37 am (utc) on Dec. 17, 2003]
[edit reason] Added breaks to prevent horizontal scrolling. [/edit]

[broniusm]

Thanks for your prompt responses. Please allow me to clarify a bit more:

I'm trying to market a particular business and service to a sector that is all business-- an amateurish site is not a good first impression. And I'm saying that I feel that the one "more professional" site would in fact turn up more contacts than the crummy, but that the nice one is just not coming up in web search results the way the crummy one is.

I suppose the solution to this will be to try to maintain the same content and structure (what's keeping crummy site popular) and just spruce up the visuals a bit. I just hope I don't lose any page rank in the meantime, and was hoping someone might have some experience to shed light on that before I shoot my page rank in the foot.

[pageoneresults]

Unfortunately there are going to be many factors that you need to look at to determine why Site A outperforms Site B. Here are some of the areas I would look at...

1. Text to HTML Ratio and Page Weight.
2. Positioning of content between the two.
3. Page Title Elements and Keyword Density.
4. Linking structure of the sites.
5. Directory structure of the sites.
6. Inbound links.
7. Outbound links.

Those are just a few on my priority list. I'd be willing to bet that the ugly one does not have as much code as the pretty one and the HTML structure is completely different between the two.

P.S. Also, if you have two sites sitting out there for your company, one of them may be getting devalued due to duplicate content. In Google's case, they will usually choose between the two duplicates and one gets the shaft. The one with higher PR will usually perform better than the one with lower PR.

[broniusm]

thanks por-- and it just clicked what your alias is about.

You hit the nail on the head: Although the sites are structurally and content-wise significantly different enough (so as not to flag google's watchful eyes), implementing the nice design would no doubt shoot the shabby design's rank downward.

So what I'm planning on doing is kind of mocking the nice design in a watered down way, just so visitors can see a unification of sites (they are cross-linked in places). I just know that there's a chance that my winning SEOtion that got me to #2 might go by the wayside...

of course, the gambler in me says I might get #1! :)

*fingers crossed*

PS: por: thanks for chopping that "loooooooooong" post