Does Google penalize a retail/wholesale pair of sites?

If so, what to do?

[Lorel]

Does Google penalize a retail site if there is also a wholesale site even though there is no content copied from one site to the other?

Don't wholesale and retail sites need to be separated as a good business practice?

If Google does do this then what should be done with the retail site?

[jimbeetle]

If the sites are different and the content isn't the same, why on Earth would Google penalize one?

Are there any other factors that might be relevant?

[Lorel]

No content is copied, there is nothing similar on either site.

[outland88]

Are they on the same IP address?

[trinorthlighting]

We copy manufacturers descriptions all the time because they require it. We never get penalized.

I have a feeling a big reason why we have not got penalized is because the sites are ecommerce, where the manufacturer informational and does not direct sell on the web. Google does understand the difference.

[Lorel]

I'm referring to retail and wholesale sites owned by the same company however with both sites being on separate hosts and separate domain registrars etc.

[trinorthlighting]

I would say no, because google will look at them separately. Most companies are like that if you think about the corporate world...

[Lorel]

I'm inclined to disagree because I can see no other reason for the retail site's desmise in Google.

[tedster]

Is there a lot of cross linking between the two domains, especially in obscure spots in the page template?

[minnapple]

I have a client that sells wholesale and retail.

For the most part the wholesale site is a dupe of the retail site except that there is no online ordering, the pricing is lower, the navigation is different, and it uses a different design template.

The retail site is promoted online, but the wholesale site is promoted mostly by offline mailings, and by tradeshow events etc . . .

From a business end, this works well and hasn't hurt the retail site.

Oddly enough the wholesale site ranks well on wholesale terms even though no effort has be made to promote it.

I guess the online wholesale market is less competitive and a few random inbound links is all it takes to rank.

[Lorel]

There is no cross linking between sites. The wholesale site snows no contact info at all--only contact is via form on website. Only similarity in whois is same city and last name.

[edited by: Lorel at 3:36 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2006]

[trinorthlighting]

If you think about it, most major corporations are that way. Think of Exxon for example.

They have a corporate site, investor site, site in the usa, site in europe, etc.... They even have a www2 site as well.

If you look around on those sites, there is a lot of duplicate content and there is no penality.

If you think big world and real corporate business, most manufacturers do not retail, they have a network of distributors, resellers, retailers, etc....

Google could not penalize for that otherwise how would shoppers ever find products to order..

In my mind, when I do a search in google for a specific product, I would expect the top three results in this order:

1 should be the manufacturer
2 should be a place to purchase
3 should be a product review

or something close to this effect. That is why duplicate content is very tricky to filter.

[Lorel]

I don't think we can use megacorporations as examples here. They have other means to stay on the top of the SERPs. Small mom and pop sites are much more vulnerable.

The site I'm concerned about is a small manufacturer of an original product with a wholesale site that went online first and then the retail site a few years later. The wholesale site does not have any means to purchase products online, only the retail site. And the wholesale site doesn't have any product descriptions either, only pictures so there are also no duplicate content issues. And yet the retail site is obviously penalized by Google.

Now, IF Google has indeed penalized this site and the only connection being the last name and city then Google can do the same to any sites with the same situation (how many people with the same last name in NY in the same business?)

[whitenight]

Hey Lorel,

I really think you need to look at off-pages factors first.

Without knowing the specific industry, I can say that Google is pretty lenient with ecommerce sectors where ofttimes the only remarkable onpage difference between #1 - #10 is the domain names and minor variations in whether the title tag say
"Buy Blue Widgets - Cheap Blue Widgets" v.
"cheap blue widgets - buy blue widgets"

Look long and hard at those off page factors, as I doubt dup content is the issue.

[trinorthlighting]

I agree with whiteknight here. Googlebot is not smart enough to determine which is a mega corporation and which is not especially since most companies write content like they are very large companies. If there was a change in duplicate content that would effect manufacturers and distributors recently you would more than likely see more people on webmaster world asking about it.

Googlebot is not that advanced yet and more than likely will never be.

[jimbeetle]

And yet the retail site is obviously penalized by Google.

Let's back up a bit. You haven't said why you think the site is penalized. Is it not showing for a site: search? Does it look like a -30 or -something or other penalty? Is it showing in the SERPs for anything?

Look long and hard at those off page factors

The first thing I would do is to make sure I had all my on-page ducks in order.

[trinorthlighting]

On page are just as good. Last year we had a hack on one of our clients html sites, what the hacker did was remove every single meta tag and title tag from the site. The only reason why we caught on was a sudden fall in serps and we looked at the onsite factors first.

[Lorel]

Let's back up a bit. You haven't said why you think the site is penalized. Is it not showing for a site: search? Does it look like a -30 or -something or other penalty? Is it showing in the SERPs for anything?

I don't see any resemblance to a -30 penalty. The keywords are either ranking well or not above 1000 but the top ranking words are of least importance.

It ranks #1 for the 2 words in the domain (which are hyphenated, btw) and this was one of the sites that lost most of it's pages back in May when Google was having problems with hyphenated domains--I responded to the email provided by MC/GG and never got a reply. It still doesn't have all the pages indexed but Google does index new pages within a few weeks of their going online.

If you add the two major keywords onto the two words in the domain (all of which are on the title and in description and in the text of home page and in anchor text of multiple links coming into the site) then that phrase doesn't rank anywhere above 1000 and hasn't for at least the last 6 months.

The site is ranking well in MSN and Yahoo but has never ranked well in Google.

I checked with the host after we moved the site in July to make sure the (dedicated) IP was new and they believe it is. As far as the owner knows the domain was new when purchased so we don't believe it is on a poisoned domain.

Look long and hard at those off page factors

The site has over 300 backlinks according to Yahoo and is listed in DMOZ/Google directory. There was no sudden increase in links and there is not a majority of reciprocals. There are plenty of quality links starting at PR 6 with a lot of them at PR 4 (the site itself is currently at PR 4 and is 2 years old).

I check the link page every month or so to make sure none of them have degenerated into bad neighborhood links.

There are several scrapers using the content of this site and some of them rank above this site but I believe that is due to this site not ranking very well. I managed to get the listing removed from several scrapers in last 6 months but that doesn't appear to be the problem. If it was a malicious 302 or 301 then the site wouldn't be indexed any more.

I sent in a reinclusion request to Google back in June hoping they would take a look at the site and never got a response.

The first thing I would do is to make sure I had all my on-page ducks in order.

The original site had duplicate descriptions on all pages and duplicate product descriptions on all product pages which I fixed last April (product pages are all static). The rest of the site only needed the code cleaned up and should have started ranking better but the rank got worse instead and has steadily declined since then for no apparent reason. I use the same SEO that I use on multiple of other sites I redesign and this is the only one that is failing. I've had two other SEOs look at the site and they can't find anything wrong it.

[trinorthlighting]

Take a close look at the backlinks that are not from the company and where they come from. That might be the issue.