Multiple sites using same text - how to avoid Google duplicate content penalty?
-
Hi Mozers, my client located in Colorado is opening a similar (but not identical) clinic in California. Will Google penalize the new California site if we use text from our website that features his Colorado office? He runs the clinic in CO and will be a partner of the clinic in CA, so the CA clinic has his "permission" to use his original text. Eventually he hopes to go national, with multiple sites utilizing essentially the same text. Will Google penalize the new CA site for plagiarism and/or duplicate content? Or is there a way to tell Google, "hey Google, this new clinic is not ripping off my text"?
-
Penalties are never a guarantee and we only have best practices to follow. The risk is there for sure. Duplicate content is never a great plan and for a 5-15 page website, the risk is not worth the reward in my books.
Hire a copy writer and have them re-write it. What a GP offers from clinic to clinic are similar but what's unique is the doctor and location. Then do your typical local optimization work with listings, places and basic directories and you should be golden.
This post will support my advice and provide context for a much larger business with a similar question: https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-local-seo-250-locations
Hope that helps.
Brent
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 to setup a redirect from one subfolder to another to avoid duplicate content.
Hello All, I have a WordPress site that Moz says has duplicate content. http://deltaforcepi.com/latest-news/page/3
Web Design | | Michael_Rock
http://deltaforcepi.com/category/latest-news/page/3 So I set up an addition to the .htaccess file . . . redirect code to move from one folder to another RewriteRule ^category/latest-news/(.*)$ /latest-news/$1 [R=301,NC,L] What did I do wrong? I am not proficient in .htaccess files.0 -
In Google Anayltics does the iPad always report portrait orientation?
I find I have disproportionate anount of visitors viewing at 768x1024, which coincides with the high iOS visitor rate. However, does this mean the vistors are all viewing in portrait orientation, or does the report portair regardlaess of orientation?
Web Design | | gotomarketers0 -
What does they use?
Hey guys, I was reading Brian's Guide to backlinking and other Quicksprout guide and I asked myself how do they use for create that pages. They are using wordpress, but what tools do they use for creating that landing pages? Optimizepress plugin? Other template builder plugin? Thank u very much.
Web Design | | Italianseolover0 -
Is anyone using Humans.txt in your websites? What do you think?
http://humanstxt.org Anyone using this on their websites and if so have you seen and positive benefits of doing so? Would be good to see some examples of sites using it and potentially how you're using the files. I'm considering adding this to my checklist for launching sites
Web Design | | eseyo1 -
Hey on some of my report cards its saying im not using rel canonical correctly how do i change this on my site?
on some of my report cards its saying certain things featured on my services page are actually linking to my blog or something. and its saying im not using rel canonical correctly. can you help me out?
Web Design | | ClearVisionDesign0 -
Penalized by duplicate content?
Hello, I am in a very weird position. I am managing a website(EMD) which a part of it dynamically creates pages. The former webmaster who create this system though that this would help with SEO but I dought! The thing is that now the site has about 1500 pages which must look duplicate but are they really duplicate? Each page has a unique URL but the content is pretty much the same: one image and a different title with 5-8 words. There is more: All these pages are not accessible by the users but only for the crawlers!!! This URL machine is a part of a php - made photo gallery which i never understood the sense of it! The site overall is not performing very well in SERP, especially after Penguin, but judging by the link profile, the Domain authority, construction (ok besides that crazy photo gallery) and content, it never reached the position it should have in the past. The majority of these mysterious pages - and mostly their images - are cached by Google and some of them are in top places to some SERP - the ones that match the small title on page - but the numbers are poor, 10 - 15 clicks per month. Are these pages considered as duplicated, although they are cached, and is it safe for the site just to remove 1500 at once? The seomoz tools have pointed some of them as dups but the majority not! Can these pages impact the image of the whole site in search engines?( drop in Google and has disappeared from Yahoo and Bing!) Do I also have to tell Google about the removal? I have not seen anything like it before so any comment would be helpful! Thank you!
Web Design | | Tz_Seo0 -
Does anyone use Ultimento for Magento?
We're working on a re-design and want to start with SEO rather than leave it until the end. Of course, saving time and money on a custom template would be great. Ultimento found at www.ultimento.com boasts great SEO features. Has anybody used it? Please comment. Thanks in advance! Kevin
Web Design | | kwoolf0 -
Will my site structure provide decent SEO?
We have an ASP.NET MVC website with a view that can dynamically display each product we offer. The product name is hyphenated in the URL, and this is what we’re using to pull the product from the database. So an example URL would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida/Sample-Product-Name We have another view that dynamically lists the products offered for each state. This page would contain links to the URL for each product offered in that state. The URL for Florida would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida We want to make sure that when we enter a new product into the database, the product is indexed by Google the next time our site is crawled. I know that Google will crawl through the links in our website, so the new product should get indexed as long as we have a link to it. In this case, the link will be on the view that lists the products for the corresponding state. I have 2 questions: 1) Is my understanding correct that Google will index the product page as long as it can find a link to it somewhere in my site? 3) To get Google to index each URL for content that is generated dynamically from a database, is having links in my site for each URL the only way to do it? Is there something we can do with the site map? Thanks in advance everyone! -Alex
Web Design | | dbuckles0