: Can having the same contact information for multiple interlinked sites harm rankings? I have multiple web pages under different domains with identical design but different unique content. That

@Martha676

The answer really depends should you have multiple websites for what you are writing about or could it all be wrapped into one website.

It could harm your ranking if:


Low quality content was present
Each blog was totally different in nature
If you are trying to flood the search engine results to rank for more keywords. Example: Some small businesses are guilty of this. They may have one location in, let's say Chicago, but they have 5 other websites with similar content in 5 other cities that they DO NOT have a location in. Google does not like this and it could look like spam.


Google is OK with a little duplicate content. A lot of websites, especially on a CMS like WordPress have footers and columns that have the same content on each page. It really comes down to percentages. If you have a micro amount of duplicate content, you are OK. This could even come from your bio being copied and pasted on some business listing sites. Google understands websites get scraped. If your percentage of duplicate content was like 20%, you would have a lot to worry about.

As far as the "similar design" goes, I would worry more about UX with this. If I were browsing and I navigated from site A to site B, and both had some of the same design, I would immediately think that the owner was or had built a link farm. Maybe that is the technical SEO coming out in me, but fresh design is always best. My philosophy is do one thing at the best quality and then build something new.

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@Jamie184

No actually- the other way 'round. If your domain name registration on these sites are similar or identical, having contact information on your sites that supports the domain name registration by being at least somewhat similar or identical will actually boost your domain trust scores.

As part of two efforts; anti-spam and author identification/valuation, a semantic database of names and various data elements such as addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, collage/university, employer, educational/professional citations, social media, and so on is being used to as much as possible positively identify two things; domain owners and authors. The reasons for this is simple: one, to positively know who are registering domains with histories so that some measure of trust can be evaluated; and two, positively identify the authors of content to know which content can be trusted over other content. It is that simple.

In as much as you can, if your contact information aligns or closely aligns across all of your contact information, this helps search engines know they can trust you and what you do providing you are not one of the bad guys.

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