No-follow for article directory?

[lfrazer]

My clients pull from a central article directory on our server (medical directory), as the information is about standard medical issues. This said, the MOZ analytics is showing these articles for each client as indexed and duplicate in content, descriptions, titles, etc. Would it be better to use a no-follow for these articles to avoid looking like duplicate content, or should I consider overhauling the resource section into static pages and making each article unique to each client-considering the latest updates in Google?

Any help/insight would be greatly appreciated!!!!!

Thanks

[gazzerman1]

OK, so I think my last paragraph might be the best option.

Let me explain.

Is the content also hosted on a master site that you own. Or is it only available on the sites you distribute it to? i.e is there a main source?

If yes, I would re-write the content taking small snippets of text from the original article and write a few paragraphs, this way you can reduce the amount of work you need to do. Then I would link to that main source but using a nofollow link.

So essentially you have all your sites with some unique content that references the master piece of content in some way and links to it for further reading if need be.

If you no index the content then those sites will never have a chance of ranking for those key phrases.

If there is no original source of that content hosted on a master site somewhere then re-write the content or noindex it. All those sites hosting the exact same content is not good for any of them.

[lfrazer]

Hi Gary-thanks for your response. Basically, we offer as a part of my company's services a medical article directory that pulls from our server, but is used for all of our clients' sites. So I think what I am asking is should I noindex the articles, even though it is valuable content or do I have to rewrite the content for each client? I don't understand your last paragraph. Could you please explain? Thanks again for your insight and help!!!!

[gazzerman1]

So you have multiple clients all in the same field that each have the same content on their sites?

What links are on those articles that require a nofollow? or do you mean that you should noindex the content?

Re-writing the content is a good idea and will remove any Panda de-valuations you might have as a result of duplicate/shared content. It will be hard to compete with that content if it is distributed to so many places.

It might be a good idea to take references from each article and point nofolllow links to those articles. and surround those references with some unique content.