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.
Duplicate content question for multiple sites under one brand
-
I would like to get some opinions on the best way to handle duplicate / similar content that is on our company website and local facility level sites. Our company website is our flagship website that contains all of our service offerings, and we use this site to complete nationally for our SEO efforts. We then have around 100 localized facility level sites for the different locations we operate that we use to rank for local SEO. There is enough of a difference between these locations that it was decided (long ago before me) that there would be a separate website for each. There is however, much duplicate content across all these sites due to the service offerings being roughly the same. Every website has it's own unique domain name, but I believe they are all on the same C-block. I'm thinking of going with 1 of 2 options and wanted to get some opinions on which would be best.
1 - Keep the services content identical across the company website and all facility sites, and use the rel=canonical tag on all the facility sites to reference the company website. My only concern here is if this would drastically hurt local SEO for the facility sites.
2 - Create two unique sets of services content. Use one set on the company website. And use the second set on the facility sites, and either live with the duplicate content or try and sprinkle in enough local geographic content to create some differential between the facility sites.
Or if there are other suggestions on a better way to handle this, I would love to hear any other thoughts as well.
Thanks!
-
Just FYI, someone specifically asked if canonicalizing a page will prevent it from being indexed last year on Moz. It's was a good discussion. Pay particular attention to what Dr Pete has to say on the matter.
Sounds like you have a plan! Great.
-
Great questions Donna. We rank in both the local search results area and organic search. Typically it looks like the home page is what shows in the local search results area, and then either the home page or services pages in the organic area for a geo-optimized search term. I didn't realize though that doing a canonical could keep the services pages from showing in the local area. Even though that might not hurt us immediately from what I'm seeing, I think I'm hesitant to risk that.
I think in the short term I'm going to keep the status quo going and focus on citations and reviews as you said. We have a pretty good strategy in place for that. I do think I will change up my duplicate copy on the facility sites so it is different than our company site, and just live with the duplicate content across the facility sites for now.
For the long-term we have been considering adding a locations section to our company website that has a single page for each location we operate, and then I would add a link on each page to get to their dedicated site. I'm hopeful that if we invest some time growing that section and adding unique content for each location over the next 1-2 years, that we could eventually discard our dedicated facility sites.
Thanks for your help!
-
What pages are folks landing on when they do a local search? If it's the services page, you'll lose the ability to rank for those pages locally if you do a canonical. Are you showing up for local search terms in organic search results or local search results? If you go with a single site and dedicated local pages with local phone numbers, you'll be able to rank in both organic and local search results.
If your facility pages "tend to perform about the same as other local companies that are our biggest competition" and your goal is to gain an advantage, I'm thinking your best bet might be to grow your citations and reviews. I'm usually a big fan of consolidation so you can maximize the value derived from your SEO efforts, but it would be very disruptive to transition to a single site. Is management prepared and willing to shoulder that?
If you're not ready to rock the just boat yet, perhaps you should do an apples to apples comparison of your local facility sites to your competitors to see if a boost in citations or reviews could help bump you higher.
I'm just not hearing a pressing need from you...
-
Hello Donna,
Thanks for your reply. I will try and answer these questions the best I can. I appreciate the help!
Our company flagship site preforms very well. We rank top 10 nationally for many of our top keywords (although they are not highly competitive terms). This website of course has an extremely higher number of links than our facility sites, and we are pretty active on social channels. And all of the facility sites do link back to this site as the parent.
The facility sites perform okay from an analytics standpoint. They rank in the top 10 for a handful of keywords that are geo-targeted. They tend to perform about the same as other local companies that are our biggest competition, but there are some companies similar in size to us that are stronger in SEO with a single domain and dedicated local pages.
The facility sites we have were actually created over 10 years ago when SEO wasn't near as big. Management felt that giving each site a local feel was what our customers wanted to see. Our customers are definitely very local, or they are doing a local search for the area they are interested in. We are a healthcare company, so we get family members looking for services for their parents or dependents that may live somewhere else.
Nothing has really fundamentally changed recently with how we do business. I'm just trying to make the best use out of the sites we have, and hopefully can come up with something to improve our sites performance and of course impress our executive team!
Thanks!
-
Thanks for the reply StickyWebz. Yea the facility sites are good for the user I think. They were originally created many years ago before we were focusing on SEO, because our senior management wanted each location to have a local feel. They felt you were choosing the individual facility more than the brand. And there is some good unique content on the sites... just unfortunately nothing that is keyword rich. All of the services pages with our good keywords are the ones that have duplicate content.
-
Hi KH,
What are your analytics telling you? Which site or sites are performing well? Were there overriding reasons to take that direction a few years ago and now the business has changed? Are most of your customers local? Is proximity important to them?
Logically I would expect results to be not as good as they could be if your efforts were consolidated into a single domain with dedicated local pages but am curious to hear answers to those questions first.
-
Are these micro sites / facility sites actually good for the user, or just done for SEO purposes? If they aren't created with the user in mind you will probably not be rewarded for them in the long run.
That being said, if the micro sites must stay up you should rel canonical them.
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
-
Can I use Schema zip code markup that includes multiple zip codes but no actual address?
The company doesn't have physical locations but offers services in multiple cities and states across the US. We want to develop a better hyperlocal SEO strategy and implement schema but the only address information available is zip codes, names of cities and state. Can we omit the actual street address in the formatting but add multiple zipcodes?
Local Website Optimization | | hristina-m0 -
Using geolocation for dynamic content - what's the best practice for SEO?
Hello We sell a product globally but I want to use different keywords to describe the product based on location. For this example let’s say in USA the product is a "bathrobe" and in Canada it’s a "housecoat" (same product, just different name). What this means… I want to show "bathrobe" content in USA (lots of global searches) and "housecoat" in Canada (less searches). I know I can show the content using a geolocation plugin (also found a caching plugin which will get around the issue of people seeing cached versions), using JavaScript or html5. I want a solution which enables someone in Canada searching for "bathrobe" to be able to find our site through Google search though too. I want to rank for "bathrobe" in BOTH USA and Canada. I have read articles which say Google can read the dynamic content in JavaScript, as well as the geolocation plugin. However the plugins suggest Google crawls the content based on location too. I don’t know about JavaScript. Another option is having two separate pages (one for “bathrobe” and one for “housecoat”) and using geolocation for the main menu (if they find the other page i.e. bathrobe page through a Canadian search, they will still see it though). This may have an SEO impact splitting the traffic though. Any suggestions or recommendations on what to do?? What do other websites do? I’m a bit stuck. Thank you so much! Laura Ps. I don’t think we have enough traffic to add subdomains or subdirectories.
Local Website Optimization | | LauraFalls0 -
Site Not Rankings After a Few Months
I have a client site that I am beating my head against the wall for right now. Three months into a 100% white hat campaign, we can't get him ranking in the top 150. Here's the cliffsnotes: Built a new wordpress website All on page SEO has been done and score an A+ for his primary kws Robots.txt is setup correctly .htaccess is setup correctly new domain multiple 95 DA, 50 PA links from reputable, national sites. Yext Local listings SSL, CDN, Speed optimized Has 19 pages indexed by Google Posting one blog a week for him Granted his primary keyword is a hyper competitive kw, but still, I've been doing this for 8 years and never seen a guy be stuck on the 16th page for so long for the sort of links we are building him. I'm genuinely stumped here and could use some help.
Local Website Optimization | | BrianJGomez0 -
Multiple location pages are they bad?
Hello all, I am research some competitors of a client of mine. My client specializes in H.P. printer repair and over the last 8 years has lost market shares to the competition. I want to reclaim market share. As I was searching some of the service companies many have page that list multiple towns that they service. here is an example. http://printerrepairservice.com/locations-we-service/ Should I be recommending this to my client? To me it seems like a spam keyword process. I know an employee of this particular company and he say their online business is booming. I want my clients to boom too! What are your thoughts on these location type pages?
Local Website Optimization | | donsilvernail0 -
Does it matter how or what site you use to GeoTag your photos?
I found a site that was very easy for me to upload my pictures, add the coordinates, download it and put it on my site. The site is GeoImgr.com, but it's not nearly as popular as some of the other's out there. Does that matter? I'm under the impression that as long as the GPS coordinates show up in the XIF Viewer, then I've gotten whatever benefit (albeit slight) there is to get. Is that correct? Or is there something about tagging them from the more popular sites like Flickr or Panaramio? Thanks, Ruben
Local Website Optimization | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Local SEO for National Brands
Hi all, When it comes to local SEO in 2015, I appreciate that having a physical location in the town/city you wish to rank is a major factor. However, if you're a national brand is it still possible to rank for local searches when you're based in one location? The reason I ask is that, although our service is national, the nature of what we offer means that it is not inconceivable that people would search for a local variation of our top keywords. Other than the standard things - location in the content, the H1/H2s, title tag, meta description, url etc. - is there anything national businesses can do to help? Thanks in advance. John
Local Website Optimization | | NAHL-14300 -
Does building multiple websites hurt you seo wise? Good or bad strategy?
HI,rategy. So I spoke to a local Colorado seo company and they suggested to find whatever keywords is the most searched under my GWT's and put .com behind it and build other sites for other keywords. I was curious about this type of strategy. Does this work? This seo guy said I could just get a DBA bank account and such for each domain name etc. I am not wanting to mislead anyone, but I am curious if for the sake of promoting other services, if creating other websites with partial and EMD's are worthwhile? Another issue I worry about is if I put my companies phone number, then next thing you know there is 3 or 4 sites that use that same phone number. To me this does not build trust with Google. But being I am learning, maybe this is a common strategy, or doomed from the start. Just curious what you think. Would you build other sites to try and rank for other services? Or keep one sites and maximize it? Thank you for your thoughts. I just do not want to pay $3000 per site if it will hurt not help.
Local Website Optimization | | Berner0 -
International Site Geolocation Redirection (best way to redirect and allow Google bots to index sites)
I have a client that has an international website. The website currently has IP detection and redirects you to the subdomain for your country. They have currently only launched the Australian website and are not yet open to the rest of the world: https://au.domain.com/ Google is not indexing the Australian website or pages, instead I believe that the bots are being blocked by the IP redirection every time they try to visit one of the Australian pages. Therefore only the US 'coming soon' page is being properly indexed. So, I would like to know the best way to place a geolocation redirection without creating a splash page to select location? User friendliness is most important (so we don't want cookies etc). I have seen this great Whiteboard Friday video on Where to Host and How to Target, which makes sense, but what it doesn't tell me is exactly the best method for redirection except at about 10:20 where it tells me what I'm doing is incorrect. I have also read a number of other posts on IP redirection, but none tell me the best method, and some are a little different examples... I need for US visitors to see the US coming soon page and for Google to index the Australian website. I have seen a lot about JS redirects, IP redirects and .htaccess redirects, but unfortunately my technical knowledge of how these affect Google's bots doesn't really help. Appreciate your answers. Cheers, Lincoln
Local Website Optimization | | LincolnSmith0