How To Handle Duplicate Content Regarding A Corp With Multiple Sites and Locations?
-
I have a client that has 800 locations. 50 of them are mine. The corporation has a standard website for their locations. The only thing different is their location info on each page. The majority of the content is the same for each website for each location.
What can be done to minimize the impact/penalty of having "duplicate or near duplicate" content on their sites? Assuming corporate won't allow the pages to be altered.
-
Cool, keep me posted.
-
Thanks again and let me know if you have any other ideas... I will keep you posted on what happens...
-
Thank you for the info... Some of that is similar to what I was thinking. I feel that corporate is pretty stiff but I will have to try to make a case with them.
-
It is time to speak to the corporation and tell them to get some professional advice. If they have 800 sites that are all exactly the same then they are at best going to see most of them fail to get indexed and at worse could face some kind of penalty or de-listing across the entire network (are these sites linked together?).
What can you do?
Well, if it were me, I would want to do one of the following:
- Substantially rewrite the content across all of the sites and noindex any pages that can't be rewritten
- Not use these corporate sites and build my own. If we can't have it taken down, at least no index it.
- No index the duplicate pages and build your own unique content on the site to attract traffic
- Create one unique and global site that has all locations listed in a directory type affair - maybe even with their own portal or sub domain with a blog and location specific content.
- Create unique social portals on facebook / google plus and try to make those the main target for search users
As ever, without a link I have to add the caveat that it's kind of tough to give specific and laser targeted advice for sites we have not seen but certainly, this is problematic and will undermine any kind of SEO efforts you may make on the sites.
In a nutshell - you need to resolve this, or give up on these sites as a way of generating search traffic.
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Well similar content does get penalty for sure. More than 40 to 50 % similar content similarity is even worse. Robots.txt file can be implemented to not allow Google to index it though Google will still crawl it.
Content has to be changed. Contact us, about us are same in man websites which seems to be ok with Google as it cant be avoided and Google understand that. But having home page and other important pages similar too is not good. Will be good to see what others have to say here.
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
-
Google Indexed Site A's Content On Site B, Site C etc
Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cwscontent
Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png1 -
Penalty for duplicate content on the same website?
Is it possible to get a penalty for duplicate content on the same website? I have a old custom-built site with a large number of filters that are pre-generated for speed. Basically the only difference is the meta title and H1 tag, with a few text differences here and there. Obviously I could no-follow all the filter links but it would take an enormous amount of work. The site is performing well in the search. I'm trying to decide whether if there is a risk of a penalty, if not I'm loath to do anything in case it causes other issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Identifying Duplicate Content
Hi looking for tools (beside Copyscape or Grammarly) which can scan a list of URLs (e.g. 100 pages) and find duplicate content quite quickly. Specifically, small batches of duplicate content, see attached image as an example. Does anyone have any suggestions? Cheers. 5v591k.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content
Hi, I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another. For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this. One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content. Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Duplicate page content errors stemming from CMS
Hello! We've recently relaunched (and completely restructured) our website. All looks well except for some duplicate content issues. Our internal CMS (custom) adds a /content/ to each page. Our development team has also set-up URLs to work without /content/. Is there a way I can tell Google that these are the same pages. I looked into the parameters tool, but that seemed more in-line with ecommerce and the like. Am I missing anything else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Duplicate content question? thanks
Hi, Im my time as an SEO I have never come across the following two scenarios, I am an advocate of using unique content, therefore always suggest and in cases demand that all content is written or re-written. This is the scenarios I am facing right now. For Example we have www.abc.com (has over 200 original recipes) and then we have www.xyz.com with the recipes but they are translated into another language as they are targeting different audiences, will Google penalize for duplicate content? The other issue is that the client got the recipes from www.abc.com (that have been translated) and use them in www.xyz.com aswell, both sites owned by the same company so its not pleagurism they have legal rights but I am not sure how Google will see it and if it will penalize the sites. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_81 -
Multiple sites in the same niche
Hi All A question regarding multiple sites in the same niche... If I have say 10 sites all targetting the same niche yet all on different C-class IPs with different hosts, registrars, whois data and ages can I use the same template, or will Google discern a pattern? Basically I have developed a WordPress template which I want to use on the sites albeit with different logos / brand colours. NB/ All of the 10 sites will have unique, original content and they will NOT be interlinked
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielparry1 -
Handling Customer Accounts When Merging Sites
Anybody have some good advice as to how to handle customer accounts when merging eCommerce sites? These include email accounts and store accounts. We're trying to limit customer concerns when people discover the sites are merging. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0