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
-
Does using Yoast variables for meta content overwrite any pages that already have custom meta content?
The question is about the Yoast plugin for WP sites. Let's say I have a site with 200 pages and custom meta descriptions / title tags already in place for the top 30 pages. If I use the Yoast variable tool to complete meta content for the remaining pages (and make my Moz issue tracker look happier), will that only affect the pages without custom meta descriptions or will it overwrite even the pages with the custom meta content that I want? In this situation, I do want to keep the meta content that is already in place on select pages. Thanks! Zack
On-Page Optimization | | rootandbranch0 -
Best site Template, Structure, etc. for SEO
If I were to spin up a new site what do people recommend as the best template, services, etc. Do you have an example of the perfect structure, I want to point my team to an example page and say - This is perfect, do this but for our product (structure, content amount, etc) Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | Jamesmcd030 -
Duplicate Content - Bulk analysis tool?
Hi I wondered if there's a tool to analyse duplicate content - within your own site or on external sites, but that you can upload the URL's you want to check in bulk? I used Copyscape a while ago, but don't remember this having a bulk feature? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | BeckyKey0 -
Duplicate content penalty
when moz crawls my site they say I have 2x the pages that I really have & they say I am being penalized for duplicate content. I know years ago I had my old domain resolve over to my new domain. Its the only thing that makes sense as to the duplicate content but would search engines really penalize me for that? It is technically only on 1 site. My business took a significant sales hit starting early July 2013, I know google did and algorithm update that did have SEO aspects. I need to resolve the problem so I can stay in business
On-Page Optimization | | cheaptubes0 -
Duplicate Content on Event Pages
My client has a pretty popular service of event listings and, in hope of gathering more events, they opened up the platform to allow users to add events. This works really well for them and they are able to garner a lot more events this way. The major problem I'm finding is that many event coordinators and site owners will take the copy from their website and copy and paste it, duplicating a lot of the content. We have editor picks that contain a lot of unique content but the duplicate content scares me. It hasn't hurt our page ranking (we have a page ranking of 7) but I'm wondering if this is something that we should address. We don't have the manpower to eliminate all the duplication but if we cut down the duplication would we experience a significant advantage over people posting the same event?
On-Page Optimization | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Blog on Subdomain vs. Subdirectory - Best Practices
Hi, I have recently been told that it no longer impacts authority or rankings if a blog is set up on a subdomain (blog.domain.com) rather than a subdirectory (/blog). However, I am reluctant to do so because I remember learning how blog subdomains did not adhere to SEO best practices. Would anyone be able to shed some light on the latest SEO best practices regarding this topic? Many thanks, Erin
On-Page Optimization | | HiddenPeak0 -
How long should anchor text be? Best practice for anchor text length?
site: http://www.cerritosnissan.com/index.htm On the bottom of this homepage there is an seo content area, basically right under where it says "orange county nissan" welcomes you. The internal links in this area are very long and I'm wondering why they would do this - is there any benefit to making anchor text longer? The longer the anchor text, the less each part of that anchor text passes link juice. For example, for a page about their reviews, the anchor text of the link is "See what Cerritos Nissan customers have to say about their experience at this great Orange County Nissan Dealership.". If I would have done this the anchor text would be "Cerritos Nissan Reviews" or just plain "reviews" as the anchor text. Why would they be using such long keywords as anchor text?
On-Page Optimization | | qlkasdjfw
0 -
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy
On-Page Optimization | | MeghanPrudencio0