Reusing content owned by the client on websites for other locations?
-
Hello All!
Newbie here, so I'm working through some of my questions I do have two major question regarding duplicate content:
_Say a medical hospital has 4 locations, and chooses to create 4 separate websites. Each website would have the same design, but different NAP, and contact info, etc. Essentially, we'd be looking at creating their own branded template. _
My question 1.) If the hospitals all offer similar services, with roughly the same nav, does it make sense to have multiple websites? I figure this makes the most sense in terms of optimizing for their differing locations.
2.) If the hospital owns the content on the first site, I'm assuming it is still necessary to change it duplicates for the other properties? Or is it possible to differentiate between the duplication of owned content from other instances of content duplication?
Everyone has been fantastic here so far, looking forward to some feedback!
-
I agree with both Andrea and Miriam in that the best-case scenario would be one site that provides links and information to different locations, provided the branding and business model support that of course.
-
You're welcome Tyler. I think Andrea has a good suggestion below too.
-
Hi Tyler,
Does the hospital have one name or four? In other words, is the whole hospital chain called St. Joseph's Hospital, or is one St. Joseph's Urgent Care, while another is Goldman-St. Joseph's and another is St. Joseph's Memorial, etc. ? If only one, and all four hospitals are administered by the same ruling body, then I would almost always suggest creating just one website if this were my Local SEO/design client.
With this approach, each of the hospital branches can be given a location landing page with unique content on it (most importantly, the unique complete contact information for each branch) and these pages will not duplicate one another in any way. Then, all the rest of the site content goes to the good of the overall brand, and there is no problem with duplication because each page is occurring only once rather than possibly occurring 4 times on 4 different websites.
Also, by making one site the official source of info for the brand, you reduce the risk of Google+ merges/dupes.
If, for some reason, the governing body insists on having 4 different websites instead of 1, then, yes, you must be sure that the content is unique on each website to avoid duplicate content.
-
I'd actually go a different route and do one site with separate pages for each location. It'dbe better for the overall issue of content/avoiding duplicate which can become a huge issue. Four sites is a lot more to manage and track and keep up and running.
But it depends on what the online strategy is, too. Google is constantly working to get localized results, too, so it's not as though there has to be four totally independent sites to get results targeted to a certain neighborhood.
I'm not saying this is the best site ever, but one hospital network that comes to mind, Beaumont, has theirs set up this way: http://www.beaumont.edu/
-
Hi Dana,
Thanks for the reply! You are correct in that I'm not directly employed by these clients. I'm guessing our best option would just be using a similar base, and reworking the content enough as to differentiate.
The difficult part comes when all the locations will offer the same services. We'll just be tasked with coming up with new ways to say the same things. Home/About Us wouldn't be tricky because that makes unique content creation a bit easier.
Thank you for your quick reply!
-
Hi Tyler,
Here's a partial answer. I am not a specialist in local SEO so you might get some more detailed ideas if some of those folks chime in on this one.
It seems to me you only have two options. One is to create unique content for each hospital. The other, doing as you suggest an using content created oin one site and re-using it on another is only going to work if you use canonicalization properly. The downside for that is the site with the canonical tag is going to get credit for that content and the site without the canonical tag isn't. You could be fragmenting good content in ways you may never have envisioned when you began. The result could be that one hospital site does way better than another in the SERPs.
I would encourage your clients (I am assuming these hospitals are clients and that you aren't directly employed by them), encourage them to express to you what is special about each of those hospitals. What differentiates them from other hospitals in the same area, and perhaps even from each other. This is the harder, but better route I think.
I hope that helps a little!
Dana
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
-
Duplicate Content from Wordpress Template
Hi Wondering if anyone can help, my site has flagged up with duplicate content on almost every page, i think this is because the person who set up the site created a lot of template pages which are using the same code but have slightly different features on. How would I go about resolving this? Would I need to recode every template page they have created?
Technical SEO | | Alix_SEO0 -
Content relaunch without content duplication
We write great Content for blog and websites (or at least we try), especially blogs. Sometimes few of them may NOT get good responses/reach. It could be the content which is not interesting, or the title, or bad timing or even the language used. My question for the discussion is, what will you do if you find the content worth audience's attention missed it during its original launch. Is that fine to make the text and context better and relaunch it ? For example: 1. Rechristening the blog - Change Title to make it attractive
Technical SEO | | macronimous
2. Add images
3. Check spelling
4. Do necessary rewrite, spell check
5. Change the timeline by adding more recent statistics, references to recent writeups (external and internal blogs for example), change anything that seems outdated Also, change title and set rel=cannoical / 301 permanent URLs. Will the above make the blog new? Any ideas and tips to do? Basically we like to refurbish (:-)) content that didn't succeed in the past and relaunch it to try again. If we do so will there be any issues with Google bots? (I hope redirection would solve this, But still I want to make sure) Thanks,0 -
Blog Location
We are planning on redesigning our homepage and are thinking of moving the location of our blog. Currently it is part of the main menu with a tab "Blog and News" Links to the top news article are also displayed below the fold. I checked with Google In-Page analytics and the news articles main link get 0.1% of the clicks and the blog&news don't get any clicks. The Marketing VP wants to move Blog&News to a link below the fold... which seems like it will send a message to Google we don't care about it and get it even less traction than we currently have in terms of visitors. Any suggestions of what we should do with it?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Duplicate Content Reports
Hi Dupe content reports for a new client are sjhowing very high numbers (8000+) main of them seem to be for sign in, register, & login type pages, is this a scenario where best course of action to resolve is likely to be via the parameter handling tool in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate Content
We have a ton of duplicate content/title errors on our reports, many of them showing errors of: http://www.mysite.com/(page title) and http://mysite.com/(page title) Our site has been set up so that mysite.com 301 redirects to www.mysite.com (we did this a couple years ago). Is it possible that I set up my campaign the wrong way in SEOMoz? I'm thinking it must be a user error when I set up the campaign since we already have the 301 Redirect. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
Magento Multistore and Duplicate Content
Hey all, I am currently optimizing a Magento Multistore running with two store views (one per language). Now when I switch from one language to another the urls shows: mydomain.de/.../examplepage.html?___store=german&___from_store=english The same page can also be reached by just entering mydomain.de/.../examplepage.html The question is: Does Google consider this as Duplicate Content or it it nothing to worry about? Or should I just do a dynamic 301 redirect from the 1st version to the 2nd? I read about some hacks posted in diferent magento forums but as I am working for a customer I want to avoid hacks. Also setting "Add Store Code to Urls" didn't help.
Technical SEO | | dominator0 -
Should I promote each section of my website
Hi, i have a magazine website and i have been heavily promoting the main page of the site thinking that all the work i am doing for the main page which includes links and so on would then pass onto the rest of my site but i have a feeling this is not correct. Can anyone let me know if i should be concentrating on each section of the site and also on my articles should i be promoting these articles or let the search engines pick them up. I already use facebook and twitter to promote new articles but i would like to know if i should be doing more than this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Where a Blog should be located?
Hello Guys, My question is, in a Company where do a Blog should be located? In a subdomain? a subfolder? a in a independent domain? Tks in advance! Regards,
Technical SEO | | PedroM0