Reusing content owned by the client on websites for other locations?
-
Hello All!
Newbie here, so I'm working through some of my questions I do have two major question regarding duplicate content:
_Say a medical hospital has 4 locations, and chooses to create 4 separate websites. Each website would have the same design, but different NAP, and contact info, etc. Essentially, we'd be looking at creating their own branded template. _
My question 1.) If the hospitals all offer similar services, with roughly the same nav, does it make sense to have multiple websites? I figure this makes the most sense in terms of optimizing for their differing locations.
2.) If the hospital owns the content on the first site, I'm assuming it is still necessary to change it duplicates for the other properties? Or is it possible to differentiate between the duplication of owned content from other instances of content duplication?
Everyone has been fantastic here so far, looking forward to some feedback!
-
I agree with both Andrea and Miriam in that the best-case scenario would be one site that provides links and information to different locations, provided the branding and business model support that of course.
-
You're welcome Tyler. I think Andrea has a good suggestion below too.
-
Hi Tyler,
Does the hospital have one name or four? In other words, is the whole hospital chain called St. Joseph's Hospital, or is one St. Joseph's Urgent Care, while another is Goldman-St. Joseph's and another is St. Joseph's Memorial, etc. ? If only one, and all four hospitals are administered by the same ruling body, then I would almost always suggest creating just one website if this were my Local SEO/design client.
With this approach, each of the hospital branches can be given a location landing page with unique content on it (most importantly, the unique complete contact information for each branch) and these pages will not duplicate one another in any way. Then, all the rest of the site content goes to the good of the overall brand, and there is no problem with duplication because each page is occurring only once rather than possibly occurring 4 times on 4 different websites.
Also, by making one site the official source of info for the brand, you reduce the risk of Google+ merges/dupes.
If, for some reason, the governing body insists on having 4 different websites instead of 1, then, yes, you must be sure that the content is unique on each website to avoid duplicate content.
-
I'd actually go a different route and do one site with separate pages for each location. It'dbe better for the overall issue of content/avoiding duplicate which can become a huge issue. Four sites is a lot more to manage and track and keep up and running.
But it depends on what the online strategy is, too. Google is constantly working to get localized results, too, so it's not as though there has to be four totally independent sites to get results targeted to a certain neighborhood.
I'm not saying this is the best site ever, but one hospital network that comes to mind, Beaumont, has theirs set up this way: http://www.beaumont.edu/
-
Hi Dana,
Thanks for the reply! You are correct in that I'm not directly employed by these clients. I'm guessing our best option would just be using a similar base, and reworking the content enough as to differentiate.
The difficult part comes when all the locations will offer the same services. We'll just be tasked with coming up with new ways to say the same things. Home/About Us wouldn't be tricky because that makes unique content creation a bit easier.
Thank you for your quick reply!
-
Hi Tyler,
Here's a partial answer. I am not a specialist in local SEO so you might get some more detailed ideas if some of those folks chime in on this one.
It seems to me you only have two options. One is to create unique content for each hospital. The other, doing as you suggest an using content created oin one site and re-using it on another is only going to work if you use canonicalization properly. The downside for that is the site with the canonical tag is going to get credit for that content and the site without the canonical tag isn't. You could be fragmenting good content in ways you may never have envisioned when you began. The result could be that one hospital site does way better than another in the SERPs.
I would encourage your clients (I am assuming these hospitals are clients and that you aren't directly employed by them), encourage them to express to you what is special about each of those hospitals. What differentiates them from other hospitals in the same area, and perhaps even from each other. This is the harder, but better route I think.
I hope that helps a little!
Dana
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
-
Content Issues: Duplicate Content
Hi there
Technical SEO | | Kingagogomarketing
Moz flagged the following content issues, the page has duplicate content and missing canonical tags.
What is the best solution to do? Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/industrial-flooring/ Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring/0 -
Best Practice - Linking out to client websites in niche industry
I have a client in a niche building industry that provides 4 different services to them. She has provided me with a list of 131 past clients of hers that she wants hyperlinked on her site to theirs. The logic is that a lot of these clients are heavy hitters and quite impressive to their peers so the links will be reinforcing my client's value. Is there a best practice for determining whether the link should be follow/no follow? Should I be checking the client's site's spam score, page rank, anything else? Some of these 131 links will be duplicated due to the client performing more than one service for them.
Technical SEO | | JanetJ1 -
Duplicate content through product variants
Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Blog Location
We are planning on redesigning our homepage and are thinking of moving the location of our blog. Currently it is part of the main menu with a tab "Blog and News" Links to the top news article are also displayed below the fold. I checked with Google In-Page analytics and the news articles main link get 0.1% of the clicks and the blog&news don't get any clicks. The Marketing VP wants to move Blog&News to a link below the fold... which seems like it will send a message to Google we don't care about it and get it even less traction than we currently have in terms of visitors. Any suggestions of what we should do with it?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Are the duplicate content and 302 redirects errors negatively affecting ranking in my client's OS Commerce site?
I am working on an OS Commerce site and struggling to get it to rank even for the domain name. Moz is showing a huge number of 302 redirects and duplicate content issues but the web developer claims they can not fix those because ‘that is how the software in which your website is created works’. Have you any experience of OS Commerce? Is it the 302 redirects and duplicate content errors negatively affecting the ranking?
Technical SEO | | Web-Incite0 -
Duplicate content
I have just ran a report in seomoz on my domain and has noticed that there are duplicate content issues, the issues are: www.domainname/directory-name/ www.domainname/directory-name/index.php All my internal links and external links point to the first domain, as i prefer this style as it looks clear & concise, however doing this has created duplicate content as within the site itself i have an index.php page inside this /directory-name/ to show the page. Could anyone give me some advice on what i should do please? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
The Bible and Duplicate Content
We have our complete set of scriptures online, including the Bible at http://lds.org/scriptures. Users can browse to any of the volumes of scriptures. We've improved the user experience by allowing users to link to specific verses in context which will scroll to and highlight the linked verse. However, this creates a significant amount of duplicate content. For example, these links: http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5-10 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1 All of those will link to the same chapter in the book of James, yet the first two will highlight the verse 5 and verses 5-10 respectively. This is a good user experience because in other sections of our site and on blogs throughout the world webmasters link to specific verses so the reader can see the verse in context of the rest of the chapter. Another bible site has separate html pages for each verse individually and tends to outrank us because of this (and possibly some other reasons) for long tail chapter/verse queries. However, our tests indicated that the current version is preferred by users. We have a sitemap ready to publish which includes a URL for every chapter/verse. We hope this will improve indexing of some of the more popular verses. However, Googlebot is going to see some duplicate content as it crawls that sitemap! So the question is: is the sitemap a good idea realizing that we can't revert back to including each chapter/verse on its own unique page? We are also going to recommend that we create unique titles for each of the verses and pass a portion of the text from the verse into the meta description. Will this perhaps be enough to satisfy Googlebot that the pages are in fact unique? They certainly are from a user perspective. Thanks all for taking the time!
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0 -
Is this considered as duplicate content?
One of my clients has a template page they have used repeatedly each time they have a new news item. The template includes a two-paragraph customer quote/testimonial for the company. So, they now have 100+ pages with the same customer quote. The rest of the page content / body copy is unique. Is there any likelihood of this being considered duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110