Duplicate content issue for franchising business
-
Hi All
We are in the process of adding a franchise model to our exisitng stand alone business and as part of the package given to the franchisee will be a website with conent identical to our existing website apart from some minor details such as contact and address details.
This creates a huge duplicate content issue and even if we implement a cannonical approach to this will still be unfair to the franchisee in terms of their markeitng and own SEO efforts.
The url for each franchise will be unique but the content will be the same to a large extend. The nature of the service we offer (professional qualificaitons) is such that the "products" can only be described in a certain way and it will be near on in impossible to have a unique set of "product" pages for each franchisee.
I hope that some of you have come across a similar problem or that some of you have suggestions or ideas for us to get round this.
Kind regards
Peter
-
I agree Andrew it has been a good discussion - that is the great thing about this community you can actually bounce ideas off like minded folks that have knowledge and understanding of what you are doing. I think it also shows that there are always several ways to go about things - it is like this discussion it has really got me thinking and I think that can only be a good thing! Thanks
-
good discussion Matt! and your right about creating our own kitchen content.
-
Yeah I agree with that Andrew - it is always best to work on one site and build its strength rather than lots of microsites - however lots brands that have franchises have standalone websites from the main brand and they do well with SEO. Peter stated above that new franchises will get their own website with identical content, except contact details etc, so it is still essential to work on unique content which will help gaining links and more.
Maybe Peter would consider your sub-directory suggestion as an alternative but I think as Egol says he should be demanding about those that take on a franchise creating unique content that will fit in with the brand, benefiting everyone involved.
I don't think you can get away from the fact that creating unique, decent content is the way forward with this - after all you know what they say content is king!
-
Well, if you break out a site into individual franchise sites... your relying on the individual franchises to rank for SEO. All new sites, all starting from scratch whenever they sign on as a franchise. If you use the method of one site using sub-directories.. you have the benefit of building an ongoing SEO powerhouse.
Further strengthening the franchise.
This is something to consider too, right?
-
Hi Andrew - I understand what you are referring to when you use the term skinning and I have seen several sites use this in relation to franchises. I came across this in the past when working for a motor group that had several car manufacturer franchises. However rather than use this option at the time we created unique content written by ourselves in relation to the makes and models, adding user reviews, etc. I found that we out ranked those using the skinning method. Also one question - do you mean that a menu option on your website actually takes you straight to the main manufacturer domain rather than containing information on your own page? If this is the case I think that you will be loosing out from a search point of view as there is no content to be linked to your site in relation to this kitchen refacing - essentially your site for this product is just a gateway page. If people find the kitchen refacing page from the manufacturer in the search engines they will be taken to their site and not yours - if I were you I would look at creating some content of my own as it will benefit you in the long run. Skinning doesn't allow you to control the on-page elements such as title tags etc. Keeping content on your site for instance would allow you to target a local area in the search engines in relation to this franchise - so you might have thiels kitchen refacing in (location).
-
Maybe the term "skinning" was the wrong term or process. I apologize if I've given wrong information.
Have you looked into what other franchise opportunities are doing?
I did a search for "handyman baltimore"
front page of google brought back two franchises using the idea I was trying to express.
go to www(dot)handymanmatters(dot)com and type in a few different zip codes from different states. Same website, same franchise branding, different local experience.
go to www(dot)mrhandyman(dot)com and see how they are doing it.
Also, we've just signed up with a franchise opportunity for kitchen refacing. We're a large home improvement company and are just adding this to our site. But, when you go to our menu tab for kitchen refacing you actually go to thiels(dot)com/products/cabinets/ the difference? it's our branding that appears and not thiels. This is where the idea of skinning came from... probably the wrong term for the actual process.
Those were the options I was trying to express.
-
I don't believe there is any other way round this than creating unique content - you need to remember that search engines will strip away all the fancy layouts etc. and analyse your sites on a textual basis so if all the textual content is the same then you have duplicate content in their eyes! You also need to think about the long term aim of promoting both sites - taking time and effort to produce decent unique content will be far more beneficial!
-
Thank you all for taking the time so far to provide some suggestions and comments,
Can i just double check that there is no techinical way around this other than making the content for each site as unique as possible?
-
What is skinning?
Skinning is a concept where by a program user or website visitor is given control of how the program or website they are using, looks to them, by choosing from a selection of differing pre-made designs (or skins.)
From the user point of view they are able to tailor the way a program or website appears to them according to their tastes and makes for a very interactive experience.
So how does it work?
Well if we leave programs to one side and concentrate on websites, the very basic concept is that as a web designer you create however many HTML pages of content (text and editorial images) are neded for your site and then instead of just one CSS file that governs every style and design/positioning element of the site, you create any number of seperate CSS files which will style the HTML page a different way depending on which one is loaded.
When the user chooses from a selection of skins on your site one CSS file is swapped for another and the page appears to have been instantly redesigned. (the actual content remains the same, but the way it is presented (colours, fonts, structual images) can be swapped each time a new skin is selected (CSS file is loaded.)
I just copied that from the web, but I would make one main website and allow my franchises the ability to skin the website to give it there own local flavor.
-
I would make the development of some unique marketing statements that fit the community of the franchisee a required part of the franchise application.
This will force the franchisee to learn about the business, think about how it will work, how it should be perceived by the public and do that in the unique context of their community location.
Get this information and work out of them while they are still hungry for the opportunity.
Give them a template to make it easy. Then congratulate them on developing all of the information needed for their new website.
This will benefit both you and the franchisee.
I would be demanding about them doing a great job on this.
-
peter have you thought about including some unique testimonials on the products to dilute the duplicate content on the pages of the franchise? also how about rewriting the content with a different structure to your own. there are always ways to create unique content have you read the latest artical on seomoz by gianluca - maybe an option some content curation around the subject? you could also include different unique snippets from the course on both sites to make the content different. hope these ideas help!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Website Redesign - Duplicate Content?
I hired a company to redesign our website.there are many pages like the example below that we are downsizing content by 80%.(believe me, not my decision)Current page: https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/New page (on test server):https://servicechampions.mymwpdesign.com/air-conditioning/My question to you is, that 80% of content that i am losing in the redesign, can i republish it as a blog?I know that google has it indexed. The old page has been live for 5 years, but now 80% of it will no longer be live. so can it be a blog and gain new (keep) seo value?What should i do with the 80% of content i am losing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CamiloSC0 -
Site architecture, inner link strategy and duplicate or thin content HELP :)
Ok, can I just say I love that Moz exists! I am still very new to this whole website stuff. I've had a site for about 2 years that I have re-designed several times. It has been published this entire time as I made changes but I am now ready to create amazing content for my niche. Trouble is my target audience is in a very focused niche and my site is really only about 1 topic - life insurance for military families. I'm a military spouse who happens to be an experience life insurance agent offering plans to active duty service members, their spouses as well as veterans and retirees. So really I have 3 niches within a niche. I'm REALLY struggling on how to set up my site architecture. My site is basically fresh so it's a good time to get it hammered down as best as possible with my limited knowledge. Might I also add this is a very competitive space. My competitors are big, established brands who offer life insurance along with unaffiliated, informational sites like military.com or the va benefits site. The people in my niche rarely actually search for life insurance because they think they are all set by the military. When they do search it's very short which is common as this niche lives in a world of acronyms. I'm going to have to get real creative to see if there are any long tail keywords I can use as supporting posts but I think my best route is to attempt to rank for the short one to three keyword phrases this niche looks for while searching. Given my expertise on the subject I am able to write long 1000-5000 content on the matter that will also point out some considerations my competitors dont really cover. My challenge is I cant see how this can be broken into sub topics without having thin supporting content. It's my understanding that I should create these in order to inner link and have a shot at ranking. In thinking about my topic I feel like the supporting posts can only be so long. Furthermore, my three niches within my small overall niche search for short but different keywords. Seems I am struggling to put it all into words. Let me stop here with a question - is it bad to have one category in a website? If not I feel like this would solve my dilemma in making a good site map and content plan. it is possible to split my main topic into 3 categories. I heard somewhere you shouldn't inner link posts from different categories. Problem is if I dont it's not ideal for the user experience as the topics really arent that different. Example a military member might be researching his/her own life insurance and be curious about his spouses coverage. In order to satisfy this user's experience and increase the time on my site I should link to where they can find more dept on their spouses coverage which would be in a different category. Is this still acceptable since it's really not a different subject?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | insuretheheroes.com0 -
Possible duplicate content issue
Hi, Here is a rather detailed overview of our problem, any feedback / suggestions is most welcome. We currently have 6 sites targeting the various markets (countries) we operate in all websites are on one wordpress install but are separate sites in a multisite network, content and structure is pretty much the same barring a few regional differences. The UK site has held a pretty strong position in search engines the past few years. Here is where we have the problem. Our strongest page (from an organic point of view) has dropped off the search results completely for Google.co.uk, we've picked this up through a drop in search visibility in SEMRush, and confirmed this by looking at our organic landing page traffic in Google Analytics and Search Analytics in Search Console. Here are a few of the assumptions we've made and things we've checked: Checked for any Crawl or technical issues, nothing serious found Bad backlinks, no new spammy backlinks Geotarggetting, this was fine for the UK site, however the US site a .com (not a cctld) was not set to the US (we suspect this to be the issue, but more below) On-site issues, nothing wrong here - the page was edited recently which coincided with the drop in traffic (more below), but these changes did not impact things such as title, h1, url or body content - we replaced some call to action blocks from a custom one to one that was built into the framework (Div) Manual or algorithmic penalties: Nothing reported by search console HTTPs change: We did transition over to http at the start of june. The sites are not too big (around 6K pages) and all redirects were put in place. Here is what we suspect has happened, the https change triggered google to re-crawl and reindex the whole site (we anticipated this), during this process, an edit was made to the key page, and through some technical fault the page title was changed to match the US version of the page, and because geotargetting was not turned on for the US site, Google filtered out the duplicate content page on the UK site, there by dropping it off the index. What further contributes to this theory is that a search of Google.co.uk returns the US version of the page. With country targeting on (ie only return pages from the UK) that UK version of the page is not returned. Also a site: query from google.co.uk DOES return the Uk version of that page, but with the old US title. All these factors leads me to believe that its a duplicate content filter issue due to incorrect geo-targetting - what does surprise me is that the co.uk site has much more search equity than the US site, so it was odd that it choose to filter out the UK version of the page. What we have done to counter this is as follows: Turned on Geo targeting for US site Ensured that the title of the UK page says UK and not US Edited both pages to trigger a last modified date and so the 2 pages share less similarities Recreated a site map and resubmitted to Google Re-crawled and requested a re-index of the whole site Fixed a few of the smaller issues If our theory is right and our actions do help, I believe its now a waiting game for Google to re-crawl and reindex. Unfortunately, Search Console is still only showing data from a few days ago, so its hard to tell if there has been any changes in the index. I am happy to wait it out, but you can appreciate that some of snr management are very nervous given the impact of loosing this page and are keen to get a second opinion on the matter. Does the Moz Community have any further ideas or insights on how we can speed up the indexing of the site? Kind regards, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Questions about Event Calendar Format and Duplicate Content
Hi there: We maintain a calendar of digital events and conferences on our website here: https://splatworld.tv/events/ . We're trying to add as many events as we can and I'm wondering about the descriptions of each. We're pulling them from the conference websites, mostly, but I'm worried about the scraped content creating duplicate content issues. I've also noticed that most calendars of this type which rank well are not including actual event descriptions, but rather just names, locations and a link out to the conference website. See https://www.semrush.com/blog/the-ultimate-calendar-of-digital-marketing-events-2017/ and http://www.marketingterms.com/conferences/ . Anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks, in ..advance..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Duplicate content but different pages?
Hi there! Im getting LOTS of "duplicate content" pages but the thing is they are different pages. My website essentially is a niche video hosting site with embedded videos from Youtube. Im working on adding personal descriptions to each video but keeping the same video title (should I re-word it from the original also? Any help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sarevme0 -
Penalized for Similar, But Not Duplicate, Content?
I have multiple product landing pages that feature very similar, but not duplicate, content and am wondering if this would affect my rankings in a negative way. The main reason for the similar content is three-fold: Continuity of site structure across different products Similar, or the same, product add-ons or support options (resulting in exactly the same additional tabs of content) The product itself is very similar with 3-4 key differences. Three examples of these similar pages are here - although I do have different meta-data and keyword optimization through the pages. http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099pro.asp http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099proEnt.asp http://www.1099pro.com/prodW2pro.asp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
Multiple cities/regions websites - duplicate content?
We're about to launch a second site for a different, neighbouring city in which we are going to setup a marketing campaign to target sales in that city (which will also have a separate office there as well). We are going to have it under the same company name, but different domain name and we're going to do our best to re-write the text content as much as possible. We want to avoid Google seeing this as a duplicate site in any way, but what about: the business name the toll free number (which we would like to have same on both sites) the graphics/image files (which we would like to have the same on both sites) site structure, coding styles, other "forensic" items anything I might not be thinking of... How are we best to proceed with this? What about cross-linking the sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webdesignbarrie0 -
Duplicate Content from Article Directories
I have a small client with a website PR2, 268 links from 21 root domains with mozTrusts 5.5, MozRank 4.5 However whenever I check in google for the amount of link: Google always give the response none. My client has a blog and many articles on the blog. However they have submitted their blog article every time to article directories as well, plain and simle creating duplicate and content. Is this the reason why their link: is coming up as none? Is there something to correct the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielkamen0