How best to handle (legitimate) duplicate content?

[Capote]

Hi everyone, appreciate any thoughts on this. (bit long, sorry)

Am working on 3 sites selling the same thing...main difference between each site is physical location/target market area (think North, South, West as an example)

Now, say these 3 sites all sell Blue Widgets, and thus all on-page optimisation has been done for this keyword.

These 3 sites are now effectively duplicates of each other - well the Blue Widgets page is at least, and whist there are no 'errors' in Webmaster Tools am pretty sure they ought to be ranking better than they are (good PA, DA, mR etc)

Sites share the same template/look and feel too AND are accessed via same IP - just for good measure

So - to questions/thoughts.

1 - Is it enough to try and get creative with on-page changes to try and 'de-dupe' them? Kinda tricky with Blue Widgets example - how many ways can you say that? I could focus on geographical element a bit more, but would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally.

2 - I could, i guess, no-index, no-follow, blue widgets page on 2 of the sites, seems a bit drastic though. (or robots.txt them)

3 - I could even link (via internal navigation) sites 2 and 3 to site 1 Blue Widgets page and thus make 2 blue widget pages redundant?

4 - Is there anything HTML coding wise i could do to pull in Site 1 content to sites 2 and 3, without cloaking or anything nasty like that?

I think 1- is first thing to do. Anything else? Many thanks.

[Aran_Smithson]

I think your header links will look spammy.

Also, your sharing out our Page Rank to your duplicate sites! I would either remove the links or no follow (are the links of value to your visitors? if not get rid!).

[Capote]

Great help here folks, thanks.

One last question if i may - each of the 3 sites links to the other 2 in the header (on every page), so i've got x00 cross-referencing links.

Any value in making them rel=no-follow? Don't want to remove them necessarily.

[Highland]

IIS7 supports a type of mod_rewrite. But even if you can't use that, you should have access to ASP or .NET and can easily use those to do your 301s

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

ISS has no problems doing 301s, and if you can use php, asp or anything similar you can just manualy put a 301 on each page if that fails.

No rel-canonical solution will result in all 3 sites ranking as far as I am aware.

Your best option is usualy one site with geo-located pages. If it has to be 3 sites, then the only real option is to make all that content unique, on unique ips e.t.c., which at the end of the day is 3X the work or more.

[Aran_Smithson]

No problem, best of luck and let us know how you get on!

[Capote]

Thanks for all the replies everyone. Tricky isn't it?

Moving to 1 site is probably the best medium/long-term option. The 3 sites thing is historical in that sites 2 and 3 were purchased (physically) by the owner over last few years.

Biggest problem with totally new is that (afaik anyway, according to hosting company) i can't 301 old sites to this new site due to the shared hosting issue (using IIS as well, not Apache), so perhaps getting them split out is proper interim measure. (I might be able to do something via WMTools with this though i guess)

Will do some more research into use of canonical cross-domain and attempt the on-page rewrite as well as talking to client about moving sites to unique hosts.

thanks again.

[irvingw]

why is it hard to restate the content in a different way? reword it. If it's products then change the order and write unique content on the bottom. By east west north south exactly what types of regions are you talking about and why do you need three sites to accomplish this instead of one with geo targeted LPs?

[Aran_Smithson]

you can certainly use the canonical, however you probably wont rank from domains 2 and 3 as your telling Google not to attribute the content to those domains.

I'm still missing the bit where having thee regionalized sites is beneficial to your visitors, why not make one general site with the products and then do some geo-targeted pages?(thats what I would do, makes for a much simpler task).

best of luck with which ever way you go, but come back and let us know what happens

[Capote]

The benefit to the user is that they will need to visit physical site to view/purchase and as such, wouldn't click on say, North site (even if it was top 2 or 3) if they were in South.

Are you (both) saying it'd be ok to link rel canonical domain1/page.html on domains 2 and 3? (i.e. different domain names)

Thanks.

[irvingw]

how is this for good measure?

"Sites share the same template/look and feel too AND are accessed via same IP - just for good measure :)"

Make them as unique and separate as possible. Different templates, different hosting, different email contact, different contact info on  domain registration, write content on the page and geo target the wording.

[Aran_Smithson]

What is the benefit to the user for an individual sites for North, South and west?

Are you not just creating a lot of work for yourself, especially since as you state ''would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally" which ultimately means each site is competing against the others.

I would rethink my strategy, Your more likely to rank 'generally'  for your chosen terms if you focus your efforts on one site and perhaps use canonical tags on the other two to ensure Google knows who to attribute the content too.

[Highland]

There's not too many options here. Geotargeted (even locally) tends to produce duplicate content. The only option, really, is to canonical all your products to one place. If you do it right, you might be able to rank all three sites for your keyword.

You can try #1 but, as you said, it's hard to restate the same content in a non-duplicated way.