Duplicate Content on Website with Multiple Locations

[charlie007]

Hi there,

I've spent hours reading posts on duplicate content and googling this but I'm still not sure what to do.

We created a site that has two WP installs for a company with two different locations - the landing page is website.com and links to WP install 1 (website.com/city1),  and WP install 2 (website.com/city2). They specifically wanted two different sites so they could be managed by staff at either location. However some of the pages have the same content - ie. services, policies, etc. so all of those are showing errors for duplicate content. All pages have different city-specific URL's and meta-descriptions but that clearly doesn't help.

We can't redirect the "duplicate" pages because then it would take the user to the other city's specific site. Is there anything we can do?? Is this going to significantly damage rankings?

Thanks kindly for any help you can provide.

[TammyWood]

HI,

It doesn't redirect the user, no. It tells Google 'which URL' you prefer to be indexed. Now, again I don't believe that this is the best option, as you want BOTH cities to rank.  Does it affect the rankings? Yes, because you are saying Page A is more valuable than the duplicated Page B- leaving Page B out in the wild as the less important page for ranking.

So, again having two versions of the domains ( based on the cities) isn't beneficial, these should both be under one domain ( wp installation) and adding a "locations" page, to reduce the self competition.

[charlie007]

Thank you for your help Tammy. I read through your links when you first replied and they helped a lot.

Pardon my lack of knowledge here, but I just want to make sure I understand correctly: If I go the rel=canonical route for the "duplicate" pages, it won't actually redirect the user, but will just tell google where the "original" page lives, and that it's duplicated on purpose correct? Does that then hurt the rankings for the site that's not showing as the "original" content?

Thanks again for your help.

[TammyWood]

While not appealing, you should rewrite all the content to be 100% unique, if it is privacy policy, tos, etc, you can no index those to reduce duplication. Otherwise, your options are limited. I realize that the products/ services will be similar in nature, but writing them in a different way to reduce the significantly similar content.

Alternatively, you can do a cross domain canonical tag, this tells Google that this content is duplicated intentionally on the other URL.

Here are a few articles about that:

https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/

http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/56326/canonical-urls-with-multiple-domains

Next, focus on building local links to the individual city pages, to further differentiate the cities and the intent. Also, using the schema.org for 'local business' on each versions of the URL's. And, again I will say this is not an ideal situation and the best case scenario would be to add that content on ONE domain just with different location pages, within a subdirectory format.