Duplicate Content, Same Company?
-
Hello Moz Community,
I am doing work for a company and they have multiple locations.
For example, examplenewyork.com, examplesanfrancisco.com, etc.
They also have the same content on certain pages within each website.
For example, examplenewyork.com/page-a has the same content as examplesanfrancisco.com/page-a
Does this duplicate content negatively impact us? Or could we rank for each page within each location parameter (for example, people in new york search page-a would see our web page and people in san fran search page-a would see our web page)?
I hope this is clear.
Thanks,
Cole
-
Thanks all.
-
Sorry, I lost track of the fact that you were talking about dupe content on multiple domains, vs. on the same domain. The same logic basically applies. However, when you're talking about essentially duplicating entire domains registered to the same owner, there can be somewhat more of a risk that the original content gets discounted (or in such cases, penalized) along with the duplicate.
If you have a main site that seems to be doing OK in the search results, you may consider keeping that domain and it's content, while eliminating/redirecting the other domains and revising their content for use on the domain you're keeping.
-
Chris makes a fantastic point here.
You almost need to detach "what's reasonable" from what Google wants sometimes. Chris is right - why shouldn't those two pages have the same content? But we're dealing with algorithms mainly, not reasoning.
-
Cole,
I'm going to say roughly the same thing as the soon-to-be-guru Tom but give you somewhat of a different spin on it.
It's completely understandable that anyone with a website would feel that the the content applicable to one city would also apply to another city as well, so what's the harm in just switching out the city names? There shouldn't be really, and in most cases there is no actual harm, in it.
However, while Google's search engine makes it possible for customers in multiple cities to actually be able to seek out and find content you've "tailored" to them, it also makes it possible for other marketers to do the same as you've done--thus competition for keywords increases dramatically. On a small scale, google doesn't want to penalize, per se, a whole site for such practices, but it does want to differentiate that which might be original content from that which might be duplicates of the original and in doing so, be able to rank the original, while discounting duplicates.
To get around this "hurdle" you have to treat each of your pages as unique entities with unique values to each of your target markets. That way, content for each page ends up being unique and Google's algorithm can prioritize all the competitors' pages uniformly according to how relevant and valuable they are to the target audience.
-
Hey Cole
-
The more you do change, the less risk involved. Some might tell you that if you change the content enough to pass "copyscape" or other online plagiarism tools, that would protect you from a penalty. I find that to be slightly ridiculous - why would Google judge by those external standards? The more you can change, the better in my opinion (but I can totally sympathise with the work that entails)
-
Google will know you own the websites if you link them together, share GA code, host them together, contain the same company details and so on - but my question is why would you want to do that? I think if you tried to tell Google you owned all the sites they would come out you even harder, as they could see it as you being manipulative.
To that point, others will recommend that you only use one domain and target different KWs or locations on different pages/subfolders/subdomains, as it'll look less like a link network. Downside of that is getting Google local listings for each page/location can be a bit of a pain if the pages all come from one domain.
It's not really my place to comment on your strategy and what you should/should not be doing, but suffice to say if you go with individual domains for each location, you should aim to make those domains (and their copy) as unique and independent as possible.
-
-
Hey Tom,
The keywords we are competing for aren't very competitive.
Two follow up questions:
1.) To what length should we change the content? For example, is it a matter of a few words (location based) or is it more of altering each content on the page. I guess my question deals with the scope of the content change.
2.) Is there a way to let Google know we own all the websites? I had href lang in mind here. This may not be possible; I just wanted to ask.
Tom, thanks so much for your help.
Cole
-
Hi Cole
That kind of duplication will almost certainly negatively impact your ability to rank.
It's the kind of dupe content that Google hates - the kind that's deliberately manipulative and used by sites just trying to rank for as many different KWs or locations as possible, without trying to give people a unique user experience.
Not to say that you couldn't possibly rank like this (I've seen it happen and will probably see it again in the future), but you're leaving yourself wide open to a Panda penalty and, as such, I'd highly recommend that you cater each site and each landing page to your particular audience. Even by doing that, not only will you be making it unique but you would dramatically improve your chances of ranking by mentioning local things for a local page.
Give each page unique copy and really tailor it to your local audience.
Hope this helps.
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
-
How do I fix my portfolio causing duplicate content issues?
Hi, Im new to this whole duplicate content issue. I have a website, fatcatpaperie.com that I use the portofolio feature in Wordpress as my gallery for all my wedding invitations. I have a ton of duplicate content issues from this. I don't understand at all how to fix this. I'd appreciate any help! Below is an example of one duplicate content issue. They have slightly different names, different urls, different images and all have no text. But are coming up as duplicates. Would it be as easy as putting a different metadescription for each?? Thanks for the help! Rena | "Treasure" by Designers Fine Press - Fat Cat Paperie http://fatcatpaperie.com/portfolio-item/treasure-designers-fine-press 1 0 0 0 200 3 duplicates "Perennial" by Designers Fine Press - Fat Cat Paperie http://fatcatpaperie.com/portfolio-item/perennial-by-designers-fine-press 1 0 0 0 200 1 of 3 duplicates "Primrose" by Designers Fine Press - Fat Cat Paperie http://fatcatpaperie.com/portfolio-item/8675 1 0 0 0 200 2 of 3 duplicates "Catalina" by Designers Fine Press - Fat Cat Paperie http://fatcatpaperie.com/portfolio-item/catalina-designers-fine-press |
On-Page Optimization | | HonestSEOStudio0 -
Do we need to worry about internal duplicate content?
Hi, I have a question about internal duplicate content. We have a catalogue of around 4000 products. Most of these do have individual descriptions but for most of the products they contain a generic summary that includes a sentence to begin with that includes each product name. We're currently working on descriptions for each product, but as you can imagine it's quite a chore. I was wondering if there are actually any penalties for this or whether we can ignore the crawl errors from the moz report? Thanks in Advance!
On-Page Optimization | | 10dales0 -
Would you consider this to be thin content
I always struggle with these pages I have on my site going back and forth debating what I want to do with them. On one side Google was content, yet at the same time its all about user experience. http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/word-lists/words-that-start-with/letter/h/ I used to have all my words listed on one page which could have been well over 10,000. Now I pagination them as you can see. I debate writing a header of content for these pages, but honestly users just want the words. Get in, get what you need and get out. What is the recommendation on these pages. Should I write content? Should I not?
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich0 -
Duplicate Content for Event Pages
Hi Folks, I have event pages for specific training courses running on certain dates, the problem I have is that MOZ indicates that I have 1040 duplicate content issues because I'm serving pages like this https://purplegriffon.com/event/2521/mop-practitioner I'm not sure how best to go about resolving this as, of course, although each event is unique in terms of it's start date, the courses and locations could be identical. Will Google penalise us for these types of pages, or will they even index them? Should I add a canonical link to the head of the document pointing to the related course page such as https://purplegriffon.com/courses/project-management/mop-management-of-portfolios/mop-practitioner. Will this solve the issue? I'm a little stuck on what to do for the best. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks. Kind Regards Gareth Daine
On-Page Optimization | | PurpleGriffon0 -
Acquired Old, Bad Content Site That Ranks Great. Redirect to Content on My Site?
Hello. my company acquired another website. This website is very old, the content within is decent at best, but still manages to rank very well for valuable phrases. Currently, we're leaving the entire site active on its own for its brand, but i'd like to at least redirect some of the content back to our main website. I can't justify spending the time to create improved content on that site and not our main site though. What would be the best practice here? 1. Cross-domain canonical - and build the new content on our main website? 2. 301 Redirect Old Article to New Location containing better article 3. Leave the content where it is - you won't be able to transfer the ranking across domain. Thanks for your input.
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
Duplicated Page Content
I have encountered this weird problem about duplicate page content. My site got 3 duplicate content similar on the link structure below. If I'm going to use rel canonical does it help to resolve the duplication problem? Thanks http://www.sample.com http://www.sample.com/ http://www.sample.com/index.php
On-Page Optimization | | mattvectorbpo0 -
Duplication About PDF Files on Website
Hello, My site's URL (web address) is: http://www.vostastores.com/ Above is the Our Website URL. We are in the process of Upgrading Our Website and for that we are adding all Details of each and every products. One of the thing that we are planning to do is to get Manufacturer's product PDF files on our Website which the manufacturer already have on their website. So our Question is that Since the manufacturer has the file on their website and we want to add the same on our website, Will be there any Duplication issue? If yes, then please provide us with a Solution by which we can add the same on our website. Thanks & Regards.
On-Page Optimization | | CommercePundit0 -
Duplicate content issue in SEOmoz campaign.
Hi, We are running a campaign for a website in SEOmoz. We get a dup content issue warning: http://www.oursite.com and http://www.oursite.com/ are being seen as 2 different urls. Only difference among 2 urls is the trailing slash at the end of the second url. Why is this happening? I was aware of www vs non www but never heard of an issue related to the slash. Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | gerardoH1