Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best practice for franchise sites with duplicated content
-
I know that duplicated content is a touchy subject but I work with multiple franchise groups and each franchisee wants their own site, however, almost all of the sites use the same content. I want to make sure that Google sees each one of these sites as unique sites and does not penalize them for the following issues.
All sites are hosted on the same server therefor the same IP address
All sites use generally the same content across their product pages (which are very very important pages) *templated content approved by corporate
Almost all sites have the same design (A few of the groups we work with have multiple design options)
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks Again
Aaron
-
I fully agree. We have notified them all and let them know its in their best interest to modify the content throughout the site. Unfortunately most of them don't and the copy remains templated.
Thanks for your answers
-
If the search is for Company product or service, You can take little advantage by doing local listing of each franchisee. Except This content rewriting is only option as per my knol.
-
Maybe part of the literature describing your program can include the point that to be really effective the franchisee's will have to write their own content. It all depends on your business model, whether you want to make them aware that they have 100-5,000 competitors from your company alone.
-
I fully agree with you EGOL "There is another problem - maybe bigger than Google's desire for unique content."
We give each franchisee the opportunity to expand on the content and make it their own, however I would say 90% of them don't make any changes.
I don't think that either the franchisee or corporate would want to pay the $$$ it would cost to have our Copywriters write unique copy for each site. (50-100+ products/services) per site or franchisee.
-
I wish we could redo the strategy but we aren't talking about small franchises here. We are talking franchises anywhere from 100 stores all the way up to 5,000 stores.
The products/services they offer are described very well and unfortunately the only thing we add into each product page is maybe a few location identifiers and a company name.
I don't want to use the canonical solution because each site has to be seen as a stand along site.
-
Each Franchise has their own domain.
Each Product/Service has a single description - Each franchisee has to use the same corporate approved logo.
All Images are named the same thing so it can matter.
I like your suggestions though...you are going the same route we have in the past.
-
Information about Google using OCR... Use this link to see an example of how google extracted and highlighted "wrigley swim" from this newspaper scan.
Google can determine the color of an image... image files are actually characters and google can extract the colors. If you go into image search there is an option limit the results by color. Some of that is done via context (such as words in the file name or words near the image), however, some is done by extracting data from the image file.
-
Here we are all giving advices based on their own knowledge. So i personally think Google cannot read images or what a specific image relates to. If I'm wrong and I hope I'm not ... can i get more details EGOL
Thanks.
-
...Google cannot read images or colors...
Are you willing to bet a month's pay on that?
-
I want to make sure that Google sees each one of these sites as unique sites...
I don't think that there is an inexpensive way to get this done and have high quality results. If you want unique content you gotta pay the price... but you could consider.
Hire several writers to reauthor the content - will cost a lot less than starting from scratch.
Get an article spinner program - that will be cheap but you will probably not like the results.
Make a enthusiastic sales pitch to each franchisee with incentives to write their own content.
...templated content approved by corporate...
There is another problem - maybe bigger than Google's desire for unique content.
Good luck.
-
You may want to re-think your strategy of franchising the product and the content. If the content is the same the only way to eliminate the duplicate content problem is to point to one of them as the canonical version, and that would very much impact the performance of the other versions of the other sites.
-
I suggest your give the products (franchise) use their own sort of domain(logo) but add franchise [your logo].
1. Their Own Domain
2. Their own product description even if it's the same product (maybe add your logo to make sure people recognizes the brand.
3. Design does not matter (urls, title, description, content etc counts) as Google cannot read images or colors
Hope it helps.
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
-
Best practices for publishing sponsored content
Hello, Our website hosts sponsored content from different brands. Should we be listing the sponsor either on the frontend and/or through markup? - Would either way have any sort of an impact? The content itself is already clearly marked as 'sponsored content' but we were more interested in listing the specific sponsor. Also, we’re assuming the outbound links would need to be marked rel="sponsored" but are there any other best practices we should be implementing? Any insight would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | Ben-R
Thank you in advance.
Best,0 -
On Site Question: Duplicate H2...
Hi All A few on-site audit tools pull information on duplicate H2 tags on pages. This implies it's a bad thing and should be fixed - is that the case? On one of my sites the tag-line is in H2 in the header, so appears on every page... Just wondering if this is something worth fixing. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | GTAMP0 -
Duplicate page titles and Content in Woocommerce
Hi Guys, I'm new to Moz and really liking it so far!
On-Page Optimization | | jeeyer
I run a eCommerce site on Wordpress + WooCommerce and ofcourse use Yoast for SEO optimalisation I've got a question about my first Crawl report which showed over 600 issues! 😐 I've read that this is something that happens more often (http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success). Most of them are categorized under:
1. Duplicate Page Titles or;
2. Duplicate Page Content. Duplicate Page Titles:
These are almost only: product category pages and product tags. Is this problem beeing solved by giving them the right SEO SERP? I see that a lot of categories don't have a proper SEO SERP set up in yoast! Do I need to add this to clear this issue, or do I need to change the actual Title? And how about the Product tags? Another point (bit more off-topic) I've read here: http://moz.com/community/q/yoast-seo-plugin-to-index-or-not-to-index-categories that it's advised to noindex/follow Categories and Tags but isn't that a wierd idea to do for a eCommerce site?! Duplicate Page Content:
Same goes here almost only Product Categories and product tags that are displayed as duplicate Page content! When I check the results I can click on a blue button for example "+ 17 duplicates" and that shows me (in this case 17 URLS) but they are not related to the fist in any way so not sure where to start here? Thanks for taking the time to help out!
Joost0 -
Image naming best practices?
While I have found many good sources of information for naming images for SEO purposes, I'm having trouble finding an up-to-date, exhaustive and authoritative source for image names, alt tags, etc. For instance... Max characters for image name? Max hyphens? How descriptive should you be? "ice-cream-flavors-icon_._jpg" or "ice-cream-flavors.jpg" or simply "ice-cream.jpg" How similar should the image name, alt text and page title be? At what point are you overusing a keyword? Rules to follow? So much more, but you get the idea! Anyone have a good reference or an answer to all things related to images and SEO? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | OSD0 -
Best practice for footer in ecommerce - Shall I add Top Category links?
What would you recommend regarding links to "Top Products" and "Top Categories" in footer? Would you add them to give extra link juice to top categories? would you try to avoid category links in footer that are already in the header navigationor in the main content area to avoid linking twice from all pages? would you vary these top category links in footer according to main category
On-Page Optimization | | lcourse0 -
Contact Form On Homepage - Best Practices
How important is it to have a contact form on the homepage of a service-based business? I am trying to decide if having a form on front page will increase the number of people filling it out.
On-Page Optimization | | TheSEODR0 -
Quick and easy Joomla 1.5 Duplicate content fix?
www.massduitrialalwyers.com has a TON of duplicate content based on the way joomla 1.5 uses articles. Do you have a tried and true method to eliminate (automated would be preferred) the issues>? if not, might you suggest a plug in that takes care of the rel canonical?
On-Page Optimization | | Gaveltek-173238
Cheers0 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5