Apoligies for not uploading a blog for some time but with Xmas and New Year yadda yadda it has been difficult finding the time to write a blog entry.
Anyway here we are in 2009 and what a great real life example I have.
TopRankings took on a new client (client will remain confidential as per our NDA agreement) however client has 2 websites and we were comissioned to do SEO on one of their website. As usual with new clients we do a ranking check of their current rankings before we apply our techniques so we know what effect our techniques has had on their rankings. This ranking was performed on the one website we were assigned and not the secondary site.
So our technical team and myself went thru the site and applied our numerous techniques to get their site SEO friendly. We didnt pay much notice to the 2nd site afterall it wasnt a site we were employed to SEO.
The following month we internally ran an ranking report of our clients site as well as their competitors etc and we noticed that their 2nd website had reached #1 – #3 rankings for the majority of their keywords. Our team were more than surprised at this and at this point we decided to investigate this 2nd website, upon inspection we noticed the 2nd website was a direct copy of the 1st website. Upon making this findings we decided to change some slight text on the 1st website and we then noticed that these changes were instantly replicated across to the 2nd site.
With this in mind we then realised that the subsequent increase of rankings of the 2nd site had to be down to the changes we made to the 1st site.
We then decided to see the differences between the 2 sites to see why the 2nd site suddenly jumped in rankings than the 1st site, we looked at # of links and age of domain, since all on page parameters were the same. The # of links between the sites was fairly even between them so we knew the links we created for the client while having some impact wouldnt of been the main source of ranking increase, however we then noticed the 2nd site was some 8 years older than the 1st site? Could the age of the domain dramatically increase the rankings of a site once correct SEO onsite techniques have been applied.
Furthermore how does this answer duplicate text problems? Well I aint overly concerned as I believe search engines can work out what sites have the same owners etc and discount duplicate content issues.
Are answer is yes age plays a big part in rankings when comparing apples with apples.
So in summary our client should be happy as we will eventually have 2 of their sites ranking well while they only pay for 1 site to get optimised.
