Solid insight, but unfortunately we do have the 80 websites because the owners of the store manage each separately. Some stores offer different products or services than others and are completely separate entities. Each store owner that we work with is an individual client; we do not work with corporate. Plus, since we don't do marketing for ALL stores in the entire franchise, just a large chunk of them, one big site just wouldn't work. Also, it's really not possible for us to make all these store owners write their own content for the entire site.

We really appreciate your thought on this and totally agree with your logic, but unfortunately would not be able to implement either solution. Right now, we just need some kind of bandaid solution to utilize as we work through rewriting the most important pages on the site (probably either de-indexing them or some kind of canonical strategy).

Thanks!

My agency handles digital marketing for about 80 Window World stores, each with separate sites. For the most part, the content across all of these sites is the exact same, though we have slowly but surely been working through getting new, unique content up on some of the top pages over the past year. These pages include resource pages and specific product pages. I'm trying to figure out the best temporary solution as we go through this process. Previously, we have tried to keep the pages we knew were duplicates from indexing, but some pages have still managed to slip through the cracks during redesigns.

• Would canonicals be the route to go? (do keep in mind that there isn't necessarily one "original version," so there isn't a clear answer as to which page/site all the duplicated pages should point to)
• Should we just continue to use robots.txt/noindex for all duplicate pages for now?
• Any other recommendations?

Thanks in advance!