How to use multistore for 2 different URL (site.com & site.ca) while sharing all data between sites.

[papagino]

Hello people, I previously had a .com site under prestashop, then I set up and switch to Thirtybees and used a new .ca site (moved clients, products, sales... data from old Prestashop to thirtybees).

I then set up redirects on my Host to redirect visitors from the .com site to the new thirtybees .ca site. (The Thirtybees site as been working for over 2 years now.)

However, my site ranking has dropped significantly since 2 + years on Google, but rank high on Bing, Yahoo, duckduckgo.

I can see a lot of "Page not found" in stats, maybe because old backlinks on the web are still using the .com links and the .com to .ca redirects are not working cause by differences in the links strings. I think that those pages not found affect my Google rankings.

On my Host server, the thirtybees site is under public_html while the old .com has its own folder above public_html.

Is it possible to use/setup multistore so mysite.com and mysite.ca would be the same and act as duplicate sites so that I can eliminate all site redirects?  I would like to have it so if a visitor goes to mysite.com/product1 and make a purchase that it would have the same behaviour of if the visitor had gone to mysite.ca/product1 and made a purchase.

I would see the sales made under the .com site in the thirtybees backoffice as well as sales made under the .ca site.

Is this possible?

Any recommendations!

Cheers,

 

 

 

[the.rampage.rado]

It is possible to have two exactly the same sites with exactly the same content but it will 100% hurt your rankings. Google will take your more reputable site and slash the other. I'm currently experiencing exactly the same - I have 6 sites in my multistore that share 50% of the products and 50% are unique. One is very old and reputable (ranks with multiple pages in first page), one is 2 years old and have every page indexed and showing in google (not first page for all the words, probably 10% of them), the rest were made last year.

Despite I have unique products with them, not only the shared categories that apply for all shops, the last four shops experience this:



So in your case - if you have control over .com I would simply redirect at server level those backlinks with 301 to .ca domain/product/category or even better if possible do a reverse and move your shop back to .com and do the redirect thing for the .ca domain (hopefully the domain authority for com has not dropped since).

[nickz]

Rankings drop also when your URLS change.
And if you don't redirect the old URLS you'll have a ton of 404.

Having a multi store is not a good idea as you cannot experiment with different keyword chains.

 
Many people believe it to be user-friendly. It is not. Who buys goods crossing a border? It is most of the time more expensive.  

[the.rampage.rado]

3 hours ago, nickz said:

Rankings drop also when your URLS change.
And if you don't redirect the old URLS you'll have a ton of 404.

Having a multi store is not a good idea as you cannot experiment with different keyword chains.

 
Many people believe it to be user-friendly. It is not. Who buys goods crossing a border? It is most of the time more expensive.  

For me the main idea behind multistore is sharing products (that can be manipulated per store context - name, keywords, descriptions, even images) and sharing their quantities, simplifying stock movement, etc.

Yes, you probably will have to adjust and optimize the product per store, but then you have to work with it's quantities, combinations, etc at only one place.
Same for order processing, etc.

[papagino]

Thank you guys for your feedback.

I now agree that having 2 sites with same contents is a bad idea.

The problem I have is not with Google indexing, as all my pages are indexed, but rather poor rankings.

Three years ago, I was ranking on average #3 for some keywords related to my products on Google, now, those same keywords will rank between 40 and 50.

I think Amazon is partially to blame as they are very powerful $$$.

However, many of those keywords will rank #1 on Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Bing...

My site is available in English and French, setup like mysite.ca that default to mysite.ca/en/ and mysite.ca/fr/.

In Google Search Console, my main Domain Property is mysite.ca, but there are also https://www.mysite.ca/ and https://www.mysite.ca/en/ in the list.

I can see that there are sitemaps listed for the first and second property.

Is it possible that this is a problem with Google because the same sitemaps (3) are being processed for the same site?

I can't find a way to delete the duplicates sitemaps on Google Search Console, should I just delete the https://www.mysite.ca/ and https://www.mysite.ca/en/ domain property and keep the main domain property mysite.ca ?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Here is my store if anyone want to look at it...

https://www.miraxsupplements.ca

Cheers,

 

Edited January 27 by papagino