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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!

Hey Moz Community, I was checking out the Links on one of my client's sites, as they were hit with spammy external links about a year ago, and noticed a large influx of Total Links to the site. According to Moz, external links have actually dropped over the last few months, so I can only assume they are internal links. But, I don't see how my client could add so many internal links over the past 5 months, as they don't do much besides upload new products (they're an ecommerce clothing retailer) via Shopify. They haven't added much over the past half year either. Total links were about 130K in Oct 2019; today, the site has almost 1 million. I've attached some screenshots for reference via Moz to better illustrate the issue. Appreciate any insights into this. Thank you in advance! hhCCUsk lyGltZD

Hey everyone, I should start by saying I'm very new to SEO (I'm actually just a copywriter that's taken on this role at an agency), so I apologize if I'm using some common terms incorrectly or if there's a lack of information. I've been optimizing my first ecommerce website (clothing company), and things were going very well last year. Strong surges in organic traffic, peaking in the summer. There was a drop before the holidays when the client dumped a ton of new product pages that weren't optimized. After optimizing the pages, the traffic went back up to its summer levels. Now, there's about a 10% drop in organic traffic since earlier this year, and a loss of just over 20% of keywords the site was originally ranking for. There's no sharp drop in the Analytics, but a steady decline. To give a better idea, the site was ranking for 5,270 keywords in February; it's dropped to 3,772 keywords in April. According to SEMRush, almost all the dropped keywords are the lower volume ones, maybe indicating long tail keywords? I'm really not sure what the cause of the drop is, as I've been following (I think) best on-page practices, which seems to have yielded results last year. One thing I should mention is the client has a unique product page for each variant of one product (so the same shirt will have 10 of the same pages, the only difference being the colour). Could Google be penalizing the site for duplicate content? It was fine last year though with that same site structure; I'm not sure how long it would take for Google to penalize a site for that. Sorry for the wall of text. I'd really appreciate any insight into this. Thanks Moz community!