SEO News

RBS and Natwest 

In my previous post, I looked at how PC World/Currys and Tescobank/Gocompare were harming each other’s search rankings. 

The two sites are confusing for Google, as Sam Silverwood-Cope explains: 

Google cannot decide between the two very similar sites owned by the same group. In one instance they are flipping positions, then they come together and perform a dance in the SERPs. 

Here, for the term ‘offset mortgage’ both sites are ranking most of the time, aside from a period in April and May when Natwest’s rankings dipped below 100 on several occasions. 

Does the more consistent pattern since then suggest that Google has decided what to do, or can we expect further turbulence? 

Here’s another example, for ‘secured loan’, a highly competitive keyword and one which would cost upwards of £14 per click via PPC. 

It seems clear that the two sites are damaging each other’s rankings here.

The maximum rank of roughly midway down page three on Google was achieved by Natwest in early January and hasn’t been bettered since.

In fact, both sites have lingered on pages five and six for most of this period, and virtually disappeared in the second half of January. For such a valuable term, this performance could mean a loss of business for the two banks. 

At the moment, Natwest is on page four of Google UK and RBS is nowhere, while rivals such as Barclays, Tescobank, Sainsburys and comparison sites are taking the page one positions. 

If we look at the pages for ‘secured loans’ on the two sites, we can see the problem. The content is identical. 

Here’s RBS: 

And the equivalent page on Natwest. I can’t spot the difference, and neither can Google. 

RBS Group has basically set up two sites with identical URL structure, theming and content. 

If RBS Group wants the two brands to rank highly, and independently of each other, then it needs to consider whether saving money by duplicating content is worthwhile. 

These two sites should be capable of challenging rival banks in the SERPs, yet they are lingering in nowhere-land on Google. The cost of saving on content is the loss of valuable search traffic. 

Smile and Co-operative bank

Like RBS and Natwest, these two banks are part of the same group, and they are also affecting each other’s search rankings. 

And we see this in the chart for the term ‘changing current accounts’. In this example, Co-operative bank starts out at around position 20 on Google, but eight months later it’s down to 30, having spent almost a month at position 100 or below. 

Smile starts lower, is higher at times, but ends up ranking below 100 in the period this chart covers. 

We can see a fairly tragic looking dip around mid July, which it doesn’t seem to recover from.

Indeed, as I write this post, I can’t see Smile in the top 12 pages on Google for this term, while Co-op is sitting at the top of page four. 

Co-op’s rankings are slightly healthier and it seems to have recovered from its slump in July. 

Again, as with RBS and Natwest, we have a case of duplicate content on the two pages. I’m concentrating on the ‘switching’ pages which both would like to rank for this term (‘A’ in the Smile chart and ‘B’ for Co-op) though all the pages shown here have similar issues. 

Here’s the Smile switching page. It even mentions Co-operative bank. 

And Co-op banks’s equivalent page. Same design, same content. 

It seems, for now at least, that Google has decided to favour the Co-operative bank’s page and view the Smille version as duplicate content. 

How does Google spot the links between sites? 

In these cases, the links between the sites are obvious to us, but how does Google decide that there is a relationship? 

Sam suggests a few signals it may look for. 

• Who Is registration.
• Content.
• Code (including analytics).
• Servers.
• Umbrella or similar network linking to whole site or certain pages. 
• Or a combination of the above. 

The solution? 

These examples suggest that Google won’t tolerate sites under the same umbrella using duplicate content and pages.

It will make a decision to rank one or the other or, if both rank, they may well pull each other down. 

The simplest solution would seem to be to produce unique content for sites, even if they are part of the same parent company, and are offering the same products. 

What do you think? Have you seen this pattern elsewhere? How would you deal with the problem? Let me know below…  

Currys and PC World 

These two sites are owned by Dixons Carphone and there is an overlap between the products stocked by the two retailers. 

Offline, many of the stores seem to have blended together, but online they are still two separate websites, with exactly the same design.

Currys leans more towards kitchen appliances etc, and PC World towards computing, but both sell laptops, PCs, tablets and TVs. And they are cannibalising each other in Google for these product terms. 

This chart, provided by PI Datametrics, shows the two sites’ Google rankings for the term ‘gaming computer’ between March and July this year. 

(click for a larger version)

In this example the two are obviously swapping places. Google can’t decide which site should perform for this term and gives credit to one site for a few days, then flips to the other.

According to Sam Silverwood-Cope from PI:

We call this The Semantic Flux. Presumably one site is just looking at its own positions in isolation, and therefore can not see this relationship that Google has placed on it. 

Here’s the same chart just showing Currys’ stats. Its SEO team must be wondering what’s going on. Indeed such fluctuations may set alarms bells ringing over possible penalties. 

You can see the same pattern on PC World. It ranks on page two or three, then vanishes from the SERPs for weeks at a time.

And here’s the cause of the problem. The sites have virtually identical pages for gaming PCs. Here’s the Currys page: 

And PC World’s gaming PC page. The only difference seems to be that there’s an ad for personal loans on this one. The products, descriptions, page layouts etc are all the same. 

So, we have two separate sites, owned by the same company but selling the same products on pages which are almost exactly the same. No wonder Google doesn’t know which one should rank. 

The solution? 

In a nutshell, Dixons Carphone needs to favour one site over the other as the current situation isn’t helping. 

As Jon Earnshaw, CTO at PI Datametrics explains: 

Decide which doorway you want to present in the SERPS for key products and services and optimise these pages uniquely and appropriately. If there are two sites involved the same applies.

Additionally, if flux is likely then provide clear migratory pathways between domains for searchers so if they have come in through, in this case, Dixons Carphone’s ‘wrong door’ due to SERPS changes then they can easily migrate to a different part of that world.

These two sites need to think of the bigger picture, i.e. Dixons Carphone’s bottom line. Semantic flux can, as we have seen numerous times with other forms of cannibalisation, lead to both domains losing out to competitors. So, decide a SERPS winner by category or service, theme, optimise, connect and monitor both position and searcher behaviour.

So, the answer would seem to be either merging the two sites or to avoid duplication of products between the two retailers. Maybe Currys should leave computing to PC World. 

Tescobank and Tescocompare 

This isn’t quite the same as the Currys/PC World example, as the sites seem to be sharing the same rankings. However, they’re both down on page four and below, so perhaps they are bringing each other down. 

The chart shows ranking changes for the search term ‘travel insurance over 70s’.

As Sam explains:

There are different types of Semantic Flux. Here we see almost exactly the same performance from both sites, where they have come together in the SERPs and dance together, they seem to be inseparable.  

This could be quite an interesting case study, as Tesco closed its Tescocompare site on August 29, leaving the field open for Tescobank. 

You might think that, without the confusion caused by its ‘sister’ site, Tescobank might rank higher, or at least more consistently.

Perhaps it’s early days yet, as it is currently at the top of page six for the term. 

The updated chart shows that Tescocompare has now dropped out, and Tescobank is currently a little higher than its average ranking over the year.

Perhaps it might take time to benefit from the removal of the conflict between the sites. 

Still, Tesco may have found the solution to its ranking problem here, even if this wasn’t the reason it closed the comparison site. 

Comparison sites are very much an SEO play and, though Tesco would have been able to promote it through other channels, the fact that it was failing to catch enough search traffic may have led to its closure. 

Whatever the reasons, the lesson here is that Google is able to spot a relationship between the brands, whether manually or not, and companies with multiple sites cannot expect to duplicate content, site structure etc and retain search rankings.

In the next post I’ll look at the relationship between RBS and Natwest, two brands owned by RBS Group, and how their are damaging each other’s SEO strategies.