Intentional Duplicate Content - Great UX, Bad for Ranking?

[frankmassanova]

I'll try to keep this as clear and high level as possible. Thank you in advance for any and all help!

We're managing a healthcare practice which specializes in neurosurgical treatments. As the practice is rather large, the doctors have several "specialties" in which they focus in, i.e. back surgery, facial surgery, brain surgery, etc.

They have a main website (examplepractice.com) which holds ALL of their content on each condition and treatment in which they deal with. So, if someone enters their main homepage they will see conditions and treatments for all the specialties categorized together.

However, linked within the main site are "mini-sites" for each specialty (same domain, same site) (examplepractice.com/brain-surgery), but with a different navigation menu to give the illusion of "separate website". These mini-sites are then tailored from a creative, content and UX perspective to THAT specific group of treatments and conditions. Now, anyone who enters this minisite will find information pertaining to only that specialty. The mini-sites are NOT set up as folders, but rather just a system of URLs that we have mapped out to each page.

We set up the pages this way to maintain an exclusive feel for the site. Instead of someone drilling into a specific condition and having the menu change, we created the copies. But, because of how this is set up, we now have duplicate content for each treatment and condition child page (one on the main site, one on the minisite).

My question (finally) is will this cause a problem in the future? Are we essentially splitting the "juice" between these two pages? Are we making it easier for our competitors to outrank us?

We know this layout makes sense from the perspective of a user, but we're unclear how to move forward from a search perspective.

Any tips?

[frankmassanova]

Thanks, Jake!

[HiveDigitalInc]

My first thought would be to simply canonical the pages to the preferred version you would want a visitor to find in search results (I'm guessing the mini-site versions b/c of the UX benefit of someone searching a specific procedure/condition)..

This will tell Google that you know it is a copy, and indicate where all authority should be passed.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization is a great resource you should check out on the topic.

Cheers,

Jake Bohall