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.
Can I use duplicate content in different US cities without hurting SEO?
-
So, I have major concerns with this plan.
My company has hundreds of facilities located all over the country. Each facility has it's own website. We have a third party company working to build a content strategy for us. What they came up with is to create a bank of content specific to each service line. If/when any facility offers that service, they then upload the content for that service line to that facility website. So in theory, you might have 10-12 websites all in different cities, with the same content for a service.
They claim "Google is smart, it knows its content all from the same company, and because it's in different local markets, it will still rank."
My contention is that duplicate content is duplicate content, and unless it is "localize" it, Google is going to prioritize one page of it and the rest will get very little exposure in the rankings no matter where you are. I could be wrong, but I want to be sure we aren't shooting ourselves in the foot with this strategy, because it is a major major undertaking and too important to go off in the wrong direction.
SEO Experts, your help is genuinely appreciated!
-
Yes, unfortunately, what the agency is suggesting is like a recipe from a duplicate content cookbook. They are trying to offer a shortcut to doing the actual work that should be involved in publishing hundreds of websites.
Has the business ever considered consolidating everything into a single brand with a single site? That way, they could have 1 page for each city and 1 page for each service, redirecting all the old sites to the new one, and never having to worry again about creating content for hundreds of microsites.
-
Thanks for the response Roman. Totally agree with you on this, but if you canonical all but one of the pages, then those pages will be dropped from the Google index right? Google will almost always display the original version regardless of location. And therefore those pages will not reap an organic traffic. That pretty much puts us back at the starting point.
I guess to simplify the question. If we use duplicate content on several sites various locations, is there any way we can get all those pages to rank in their respective markets?
-
While not appealing, you should rewrite all the content to be 100% unique, if it is privacy policy, tos, etc, you can no index those to reduce duplication. Otherwise, your options are limited. I realize that the products/ services will be similar in nature, but writing them in a different way to reduce the significantly similar content.
Alternatively, you can do a cross domain canonical tag, this tells Google that this content is duplicated intentionally on the other URL.
Here are a few articles about that:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/myths-about-duplicate-content/
https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/56326/canonical-urls-with-multiple-domains
Next, focus on building local links to the individual city pages, to further differentiate the cities and the intent. Also, using the schema.org for 'local business' on each versions of the URL's. And, again I will say this is not an ideal situation and the best case scenario would be to add that content on ONE domain just with different location pages, within a subdirectory format.
IF THE ANSWER WERE FINE ---->>>>> DONT FORGET CLICK ON THUMB UP<<<<<
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
-
Will I be flagged for duplicate content by Google?
Hi Moz community, Had a question regarding duplicate content that I can't seem to find the answer to on Google. My agency is working on a large number of franchisee websites (over 40) for one client, a print franchise, that wants a refresh of new copy and SEO. Each print shop has their own 'microsite', though all services and products are the same, the only difference being the location. Each microsite has its own unique domain. To avoid writing the same content over and over in 40+ variations, would all the websites be flagged by Google for duplicate content if we were to use the same base copy, with the only changes being to the store locations (i.e. where we mention Toronto print shop on one site may change to Kelowna print shop on another)? Since the print franchise owns all the domains, I'm wondering if that would be a problem since the sites aren't really competing with one another. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdenPrez0 -
Does cache-control : private hurt SEO?
Hi, I recently found I can no longer view our web pages in Google's cache. I get 404 errors. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ashop.nordstrom.com%2Fc%2Fwomens-shoes&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS751US751&oq=cache%3Ashop.nordstrom.com%2Fc%2Fwomens-shoes&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.3575j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 I did a fetch and render in Search Console and found our header includes a "cache-control: private" entry. The 404's started happening recently. Would this response be the culprit? If Google cannot cache the website, is this bad for SEO? On the surface of it, it sounds bad.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shop.nordstrom0 -
Duplicate Content through 'Gclid'
Hello, We've had the known problem of duplicate content through the gclid parameter caused by Google Adwords. As per Google's recommendation - we added the canonical tag to every page on our site so when the bot came to each page they would go 'Ah-ha, this is the original page'. We also added the paramter to the URL parameters in Google Wemaster Tools. However, now it seems as though a canonical is automatically been given to these newly created gclid pages; below https://www.google.com.au/search?espv=2&q=site%3Awww.mypetwarehouse.com.au+inurl%3Agclid&oq=site%3A&gs_l=serp.3.0.35i39l2j0i67l4j0i10j0i67j0j0i131.58677.61871.0.63823.11.8.3.0.0.0.208.930.0j3j2.5.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..8.3.419.nUJod6dYZmI Therefore these new pages are now being indexed, causing duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea about what to do in this situation? Thanks, Stephen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyPetWarehouse0 -
Does it hurt your SEO to have an inaccessible directory in your site structure?
Due to CMS constraints, there may be some nodes in our site tree that are inaccessible and will automatically redirect to their parent folder. Here's an example: www.site.com/folder1/folder2/content, /folder2 redirects to /folder1. This would only be for the single URL itself, not the subpages (i.e. /folder1/folder2/content and anything below that would be accessible). Is there any real risk in this approach from a technical SEO perspective? I'm thinking this is likely a non-issue but I'm hoping someone with more experience can confirm. Another potential option is to have /folder2 accessible (it would be 100% identical to /folder1, long story) and use a canonical tag to point back to /folder1. I'm still waiting to hear if this is possible. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalcrc0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Woocommerce SEO & Duplicate content?
Hi Moz fellows, I'm new to Woocommerce and couldn't find help on Google about certain SEO-related things. All my past projects were simple 5 pages websites + a blog, so I would just no-index categories, tags and archives to eliminate duplicate content errors. But with Woocommerce Product categories and tags, I've noticed that many e-Commerce websites with a high domain authority actually rank for certain keywords just by having their category/tags indexed. For example keyword 'hippie clothes' = etsy.com/category/hippie-clothes (fictional example) The problem is that if I have 100 products and 10 categories & tags on my site it creates THOUSANDS of duplicate content errors, but If I 'non index' categories and tags they will never rank well once my domain authority rises... Anyone has experience/comments about this? I use SEO by Yoast plugin. Your help is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance. -Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcandre1 -
Using the same content on different TLD's
HI Everyone, We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same language. For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German, We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise? All answers appreciated. Cheers, Mel.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape1 -
Concerns about duplicate content issues with australian and us version of website
My company has an ecommerce website that's been online for about 5 years. The url is www.betterbraces.com. We're getting ready to launch an australian version of the website and the url will be www.betterbraces.com.au. The australian website will have the same look as the US website and will contain about 200 of the same products that are featured on the US website. The only major difference between the two websites is the price that is charged for the products. The australian website will be hosted on the same server as the US website. To ensure Australians don't purchase from the US site we are going to have a geo redirect in place that sends anyone with a AU ip address to the australian website. I am concerned that the australian website is going to have duplicate content issues. However, I'm not sure if the fact that the domains are so similar coupled with the redirect will help the search engines understand that these sites are related. I would appreciate any recommendations on how to handle this situation to ensure oue rankings in the search engines aren't penalized. Thanks in advance for your help. Alison French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djo-2836690