Duplicate content on charity website

[fraserhannah]

Hi Mozers,

We are working on a website for a UK charity – they are a hospice and have two distinct brands, one for their adult services and another for their children’s services.

They currently have two different websites which have a large number of pages that contain identical text. We spoke with them and agreed that it would be better to combine the websites under one URL – that way a number of the duplicate pages could be reduced as they are relevant to both brands.

What seamed like a good idea initially is beginning to not look so good now. We had planned to use CSS to load different style sheets for each brand – depending on the referring URL (adult / Child) the page would display the appropriate branding. This will will work well up to a point.

What we can’t work out is how to style the page if it is the initial landing page – the brands are quite different and we need to get this right. It is not such an issue for the management type pages (board of trustees etc) as they govern both identities.

The issue is the donation, fundraising pages – they need to be found, and we are concerned that users will be confused if one of those pages is the initial landing page and they are served the wrong brand. We have thought of making one page the main page and using rel canonical on the other one, but that will affect its ability to be found in the search engines.

Really not sure what the best way to move forward would be, any suggestions / guidance would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Fraser

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[evolvingSEO]

Hi Fraser

Thanks for the info! Without being too intimately involved, based upon this description - it sounds like keeping two separate sites would have been perfectly fine. It seems like there'd be least user confusion (and much easier maintenance for you) with two sites. As mentioned the duplicate content issue is more of a myth as far as causing penalties in this situation.

However with that said - this doesn't mean you wouldn't want to mitigate against keeping the sites as unique as possible. You'd want to customize the content as much as you could for each site. I'd imagine because they are so different in real life, this wouldn't be hard to do - unique text, photos, design, etc.

Also - from looking at the sitemap, I don't think every one of those pages would be "landing pages" for commercial search terms. That's really the only issue I'd worry about - if you did have duplicate pages that were competing with one another to rank for the same keyword - but it doesn't sound like that's the case here.

[Xtend-Life]

What CMS are you using?

If the pages are loading the style sheets globally, can you just use a class/id for the body of adult and child pages then use these classes for setting the different styles:

.child-template .container-div {  }

.adult-template .container-div {  }

Then you can have the layout/page structure under the one URL with different styles.

[fraserhannah]

Hi Dan,

Each site has around 65 pages with around 55% being shared between the two sites (duplicates).

In the real world the services it is one governing charity with two distinct brands. They both operate out of the same location, but have separate parts of the building. They have different names, distinct branding and each entity has its own social media accounts.

They cater for two distinct user groups – they look after people that are terminally ill EV is the adult service and JG is the children’s service. This is why the branding is so different with EV having an adult theme and JG having a child friendly theme as it is not only catering to patents but also to siblings.

It was the quantity of duplicate pages that initially concerned us which is why we wanted to move to a one site option. I have uploaded the separate navigation structures to imager which hopefully will make things clearer.

http://imgur.com/tmk36pQ

http://imgur.com/sc3xiwK

Thanks again

Fraser

[evolvingSEO]

Few questions:

• How many pages are each site separately?
• How many pages of those are duplicates? (ie: looking for % of pages duplicate vs not)
• In the "real-world" how distinct are the two services? Different locations? Different names, logos, legal business entities?
• Do the two services serve two distinctly different customers? ie: would the same person ever be a customer of both places?
• What about other things like social media - different accounts for each one?

I should clarify too, that "duplicate content" as a penalty is a myth. The angle I would really approach this, would be from UX - what makes it easiest for users to find/understand/navigate the two services and not be confused? Some answers to the questions above would help!

[Lumina]

I don't know if the brand differences need to be disparate,  but one option would be to just have one page for both - not different versions, but just always one page. You could add content that makes clear the page refers to both brands, and even generate new, rich content for it - while, on donation forms and landing pages, having a step or form-field that allows the user to choose which they're interested in.