What happens when content on your website (and blog) is an exact match to multiple sites?
-
In general, I understand that having duplicate content on your website is a bad thing. But I see a lot of small businesses (specifically dentists in this example) who hire the same company to provide content to their site. They end up with the EXACT same content as other dentists. Here is a good example:
http://www.hodnettortho.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth-2/
http://www.braces2000.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth-2/
http://www.gentledentalak.com/blog/2013/02/valentine’s-day-and-your-teeth/
If you google the title of that blog article you find tons of the same article all over the place.
So, overall, doesn't this make the content on these blogs irrelevant? Does this hurt the SEO on these sites at all? What is the value of having completely unique content on your site/blog vs having duplicate content like this?
-
Thanks to everyone who commented on this!
Meta, your answer seems to have valid points on different levels. I appreciate the insight!
-
Hey Morgan, I've seen this often with professional sites of all sorts. The vendor is selling a content service but the buyer is either not aware that the same content is being sold to all their clients, or not aware that it makes a difference. Often, the buyer is on the hook for the service for a year or so.
Here's the thing: Competing in the search engines is about differentiating your website and getting people to engage with your content--and it's hard to do either of those things with content that's common to hundreds or thousands of other sites. In answer to your question, the duplication doesn't necessarily make you site irrelevant, it just doesn't give search engines a reason to rank it higher than the next dentist.
What that content does do is provide your local visitors with a feeling that your practice is up to date with news and technology and that can be an advantage over a site that lacks any updated content--you'll just have to drum up those visitors from somewhere other that organic search.
One of those other places is local search. With or without dupe content, you can still focus on making your local results stronger and it can be argued that that's better than showing up in the organic results for many dentists.
-
These dentists seem to be satisfied with pedestrian content on a generic website. They probably rank OK in local search if they are competing in Soldotna or Bugtussle and have someone who knows how to work local.
If they face stiffer competition, especially in organic SERPs, then they will probably not compete very well.
If I was a dentist I would want my own content and photos on the site.... just because.
-
If all these dentist have exactly the same content - how is a prospective customer going to decide which one is best?
"We're just like the next guy" isn't a Unique Value Proposition and isn't going to help your business stand apart from the crowd.
Unique content is harder, but it's so much better than generic "insert your practice name here" boiler plate content.
-
Thanks, James!
Anyone else have any thoughts on this type of thing?
-
It may not be getting them a manual penalty but it's definitely not helping them in the long term either. Creating unique and useful content is the only way to keep gaining organic search traffic in the long run.
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
-
We have a site with a lot of international traffic, can we split the site some way?
Hello, We have a series of sites and one, in particular, has around 75,000 (20%) monthly users from the USA, but we don't currently offer them anything as our site is aimed at the UK market. The site is a .com and though we own the .co.uk the .com is the primary domain. We have had a lot of success moving other sites to have the .co.uk as the primary domain for UK traffic. However, in this case, we want to keep both the UK traffic and the US traffic and if we split it into two sites, only one can win right? What could do? It would be cool to have a US version of our site but without affecting traffic too much. On the other sites, we simply did 301 redirects from the .com page to the corresponding .co.uk page. Any ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AllAboutGroup0 -
Why Google cached another site, not mine?
Hi Guys, please help me. I need your help regarding my business website i.e. https://www.kamagratablets.com/. Before 8-10 days it was ranked in top 10 from home page but I lost my position and ranking page also changed by Google. If you will check caching of this website then you will see Google cache another site - http://www.hiphoptoptower.com/ - I have checked my code and nothing found related to this website. Please check and help me on this point, how can I remove this site from caching and get my previous ranking in Google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Devtechexpert0 -
How to re-rank an established website with new content
I can't help but feel this is a somewhat untapped resource with a distinct lack of information.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChimplyWebGroup
There is a massive amount of information around on how to rank a new website, or techniques in order to increase SEO effectiveness, but to rank a whole new set of pages or indeed to 're-build' a site that may have suffered an algorithmic penalty is a harder nut to crack in terms of information and resources. To start I'll provide my situation; SuperTED is an entertainment directory SEO project.
It seems likely we may have suffered an algorithmic penalty at some point around Penguin 2.0 (May 22nd) as traffic dropped steadily since then, but wasn't too aggressive really. Then to coincide with the newest Panda 27 (According to Moz) in late September this year we decided it was time to re-assess tactics to keep in line with Google's guidelines over the two years. We've slowly built a natural link-profile over this time but it's likely thin content was also an issue. So beginning of September up to end of October we took these steps; Contacted webmasters (and unfortunately there was some 'paid' link-building before I arrived) to remove links 'Disavowed' the rest of the unnatural links that we couldn't have removed manually. Worked on pagespeed as per Google guidelines until we received high-scores in the majority of 'speed testing' tools (e.g WebPageTest) Redesigned the entire site with speed, simplicity and accessibility in mind. Htaccessed 'fancy' URLs to remove file extensions and simplify the link structure. Completely removed two or three pages that were quite clearly just trying to 'trick' Google. Think a large page of links that simply said 'Entertainers in London', 'Entertainers in Scotland', etc. 404'ed, asked for URL removal via WMT, thinking of 410'ing? Added new content and pages that seem to follow Google's guidelines as far as I can tell, e.g;
Main Category Page Sub-category Pages Started to build new links to our now 'content-driven' pages naturally by asking our members to link to us via their personal profiles. We offered a reward system internally for this so we've seen a fairly good turnout. Many other 'possible' ranking factors; such as adding Schema data, optimising for mobile devices as best we can, added a blog and began to blog original content, utilise and expand our social media reach, custom 404 pages, removed duplicate content, utilised Moz and much more. It's been a fairly exhaustive process but we were happy to do so to be within Google guidelines. Unfortunately, some of those link-wheel pages mentioned previously were the only pages driving organic traffic, so once we were rid of these traffic has dropped to not even 10% of what it was previously. Equally with the changes (htaccess) to the link structure and the creation of brand new pages, we've lost many of the pages that previously held Page Authority.
We've 301'ed those pages that have been 'replaced' with much better content and a different URL structure - http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/bands-musicians/wedding-bands to simply http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands, for example. Therefore, with the loss of the 'spammy' pages and the creation of brand new 'content-driven' pages, we've probably lost up to 75% of the old website, including those that were driving any traffic at all (even with potential thin-content algorithmic penalties). Because of the loss of entire pages, the changes of URLs and the rest discussed above, it's likely the site looks very new and probably very updated in a short period of time. What I need to work out is a campaign to drive traffic to the 'new' site.
We're naturally building links through our own customerbase, so they will likely be seen as quality, natural link-building.
Perhaps the sudden occurrence of a large amount of 404's and 'lost' pages are affecting us?
Perhaps we're yet to really be indexed properly, but it has been almost a month since most of the changes are made and we'd often be re-indexed 3 or 4 times a week previous to the changes.
Our events page is the only one without the new design left to update, could this be affecting us? It potentially may look like two sites in one.
Perhaps we need to wait until the next Google 'link' update to feel the benefits of our link audit.
Perhaps simply getting rid of many of the 'spammy' links has done us no favours - I should point out we've never been issued with a manual penalty. Was I perhaps too hasty in following the rules? Would appreciate some professional opinion or from anyone who may have experience with a similar process before. It does seem fairly odd that following guidelines and general white-hat SEO advice could cripple a domain, especially one with age (10 years+ the domain has been established) and relatively good domain authority within the industry. Many, many thanks in advance. Ryan.0 -
Can one business operate under more than one website?
Is it possible for a business to rank organically for the same keyword multiple times with different web addresses? Say if I sell car keys and I wanted to rank for "buy new car keys" and I set up two different website say ibuycarkeys.com and carkeycity.com and then operate under both of these, would Google frown upon this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | steve2150 -
Untrusted site - malware!
I recently had my link profile done as I was badly effected by something in 2012 (Penguin, Panda.. who knows? never got a message from google in webmaster about anything). Loads of INBOUND links were identified as being 'dodgy'' and the person highlighted them in different colors. However, another seo éxpert' told me to leave them (perhaps remove just 3 of them) and don't bother with the rest. Now I am not sure what to do? Any opinions? RED
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Llanero
3 were highlighted as being from untrusted malware. I think I should disavow them but really, would 3 make that much difference for a fall in my site? ORANGE
240 were said to be spam articles and I was advised:
The following pages highlighted in orange are on sites created for the purpose of publishing articles for link building. Since the same articles appear on multiple sites, Google views this as duplicate content. Links to Monteverde Tours in these articles should be removed or tagged "nofollow." Where this is not possible, the domains should be disavowed. YELLOW
85 were said to be from Low-quality directories
The following pages highlighted in yellow are on low-quality directories and link farms. Links to Monteverde Tours on these pages should be removed or the domains disavowed. GREEN
340 were said to be from sites were the page was not found , Account suspended, Problem loading page, Link removed, domain expired
The following pages highlighted in green include pages whose links to Monteverde Tours have been removed and pages that were inaccessible for various reasons, as shown in the Comments column. These pages or their domains should be disavowed to remove them from the Google index. I have read (and asked on this forum) about disavow but the more I read the more I am getting confused about the next action. I tried for one year to get rid of any bad outbound links, did blogging, social media, improved content, landing pages etc but all to no avail. Any opinions appreciated. I am not looking for a magic bullet, I know there isn't one. I know I need to keep improving content etc but after a year of NO improvements should I consider the link removal route? <colgroup><col width="215"></colgroup>
| Untrusted site - malware! |0 -
Blog commenting - dos and don'ts
Dear Community, I'm getting into blog commenting heavily now for the relationships I'm building with other bloggers. I think the relationships I will build with these other influencers will be helpful. But I'm concerned that Google may penalize my site if I have a lot of links coming from blog commenting. If I sense that a blog is spammy, obviously I stay away. I've also noticed that a number of CommentLuv sites include a link to my latest blog post, and that has helped me greatly in promoting my posts and building readership. I am also interested in the follow links I get from it, but concerned in that regard that (1) Google won't count those follow links (won't pass page rank) and (2) Google will penalize me for some reason or in some way. What does everyone think about this approach of blog commenting, and in particular, including posting some comments on CommentLuv blogs. Thanks! Mike
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Harbor_Compliance0 -
Ranking in Multiple Geographic Locations
Hey Mozers, We are a Joomla Web Design firm located in Milwaukee Wisconsin, however, we serve clients all over the midwest (and US) (chicago, madison, minneapolis, etc) I'm curious what the best strategy for ranking in these new geographic areas? Originally I was thinking of creating geographic specific landing pages for each area, however, i'm scared it will hurt us with Google's recent penguin and panda 3.5 updates. Also, won't i need to link to these landing pages from our main website to get them indexed? What about creating mini websites on subdomains: (example) Chicago.SavvyPanda.com?? What are your ideas? Do you have clients who have successfully started ranking in multiple geographic cities/areas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SavvyPanda0 -
Should we add our site to Google Webmaster Tools
Hello, Should we add our site nlpca(dot)com to google webmaster tools? Everything's very white hat but we do have a section on each of our 4 sites for "Our other Sites" that link to the others. It's been there for many years. We're looking for clues as to why we've dropped in rank Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0