Multiple cities/regions websites - duplicate content?
-
We're about to launch a second site for a different, neighbouring city in which we are going to setup a marketing campaign to target sales in that city (which will also have a separate office there as well).
We are going to have it under the same company name, but different domain name and we're going to do our best to re-write the text content as much as possible. We want to avoid Google seeing this as a duplicate site in any way, but what about:
- the business name
- the toll free number (which we would like to have same on both sites)
- the graphics/image files (which we would like to have the same on both sites)
- site structure, coding styles, other "forensic" items
- anything I might not be thinking of...
How are we best to proceed with this? What about cross-linking the sites?
-
Thanks for coming back to this thread with more info. I am always eager to hear about local business decision making because there are numerous approaches. I sincerely hope this works out well for you. It's a big effort to branch out. I like this reason you've listed: " Additionally, we use the city name in anchor text in backlinking. " Sounds good to me. And that's good that you've got the local area code phone numbers. So important! Good luck, Web Design Barrie! Miriam
-
We have a couple of reasons for doing multiple sites. The primary reason is that we feel that we will have better optimization for that city, as the current site has been optimized for the city that it is in (the keyword being the city). I feel that if we were to optimize the on-page content for the main site for another city that we would be diluting that city's keyword. Additionally, we use the city name in anchor text in backlinking.
The second reason is more of a business strategy reason, as we want the second office to be a separate entity open for sale as a JV opportunity for a managing partner, or possibly even franchise.
Both sites have a local telephone number.
-
Hi Web Design Barrie,
This is an interesting scenario. Most typically, when a business opens a second office that essentially offers the same services in a neighboring city, the new content/new location will simply be added to the existent site. A new landing page for the new city will be developed, the new NAP will be added to the footer, and new content will be added over time featuring work in the new city. A new Google Place page and other new local business index listings will be created for the new physical location. So long as you aren't dealing with a ton of branches of the business, this process works just fine.
You are going a different route, building a completely different website for the new branch. So, yes, because you are offering the same services at second location, you are thinking correctly about the need to rewrite all content so it's not a duplicate of site #1.
If your businesses are local, you shouldn't be using an 800 number. If you have to, put it in an image. Local search hangs, in part, on your local area code phone numbers and these should be totally distinct for the 2 different offices.
Don't worry about the code. Millions of sites share the same code.
The images are also not a big worry...but if the two offices are so identical that you can use identical imagery for them, it again makes me wonder about the decision to build a separate site. What about shots of your unique building, staff and other features at location #2.
Finally, the big thing you're going to want to attend to is that all Local SEO is handled expertly as you roll out the new business. What you're trying to avoid is Google becoming confused about the 2 businesses and merging their data. *See again my point about the phone numbers. Make sure good local SEO hooks are part of both sites, consider using hCard or Schema and take care to be error free when you create your Google Place Page and other listings.
It should be fine if these things go well. Out of my own curiosity as a Local SEO...I would really like to know about the process then led to you deciding to build a second site. I can think of certain instances in which this would be the best choice, but more often than not, going with a single site makes sense. If you have the time, I'd like to know how you decided to go this other route.
Hope my response is helpful!
Miriam
-
The cross linking sites - absolutely - they refer to the same industry so that's great.
With regards to all these other things I wouldn't be worry that much.
Try to think of it as if you bought a website template from some template library - chances are, many other sites are using the same template. You can even take under consideration frameworks and complete systems like for instance Wordpress - the same scenario.
Company name is definitely not going to be of a problem either - neither will telephone number.
We have a few websites promoting our business - some point towards local traffic and some worldwide.
Our business name on all (including the content) is the same and so are telephone numbers.I think you're pretty safe as long as you've got the content re-written and meta tags at least a bit different between the sites.
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
-
Crawling/indexing of near duplicate product pages
Hi, Hope someone can help me out here. This is the current situation: We sell stones/gravel/sand/pebbles etc. for gardens. I will take a type of pebbles and the corresponding pages/URL's to illustrate my question --> black beach pebbles. We have a 'top' product page for black beach pebbles on which you can find different types of quantities (differing from 20kg untill 1600 kg). There is not any search volume related to the different quantities The 'top' page does not link to the pages for the different quantities The content on the pages for the different quantities is not exactly the same (different price + slightly different content). But a lot of the content is the same. Current situation:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMAGARD
- Most pages for the different quantities do not have internal links (about 95%) But the sitemap does contain all of these pages. Because the sitemap contains all these URL's, google frequently crawls them (I checked the logfiles) and has indexed them. Problems: Google spends its time crawling irrelevant pages --> our entire website is not that big, so these quantity URL's kind of double the total number of URL's. Having url's in the sitemap that do not have an internal link is a problem on its own All these pages are indexed so all sorts of gravel/pebbles have near duplicates. My solution: remove these URL's from the sitemap --> that will probably stop Google from regularly crawling these pages Putting a canonical on the quantity pages pointing to the top-product page. --> that will hopefully remove the irrelevant (no search volume) near duplicates from the index My questions: To be able to see the canonical, google will need to crawl these pages. Will google still do that after removing them from the sitemap? Do you agree that these pages are near duplicates and that it is best to remove them from the index? A few of these quantity pages do have intenral links (a few procent of them) because of a sale campaign. So there will be some (not much) internal links pointing to non-canonical pages. Would that be a problem? Thanks a lot in advance for your help! Best!1 -
Search console, duplicate content and Moz
Hi, Working on a site that has duplicate content in the following manner: http://domain.com/content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulneuteboom
http://www.domain.com/content Question: would telling search console to treat one of them as the primary site also stop Moz from seeing this as duplicate content? Thanks in advance, Best, Paul. http0 -
How to Set Up Canonical Tags to Eliminate Duplicate Content Error
Google Webmaster Tools under HTML improvements is showing duplicate meta descriptions for 2 similar pages. The 2 pages are for building address. The URL has several pages because there are multiple property listings for this building. The URLs in question are: www.metro-manhattan.com/601-west-26th-street-starrett-lehigh-building-contains-executive-office-space-manhattan/page/3 www.metro-manhattan.com/601-west-26th-street-starrett-lehigh-building-contains-executive-office-space-manhattan How do I correct this error using canonical tags? Do I enter the URL of the 1<sup>st</sup> page under “Canonical URL” under “Advanced” to show Google that these pages are one and the same? If so, do I enter the entire URL into this field (www.metro-manhattan.com /601-west-26th-street-starrett-lehigh-building-contains-executive-office-space-manhattan) or an abbreviated version (/601-west-26th-street-starrett-lehigh-building-contains-executive-office-space-manhattan)? Please see attached images. Thanks!! Alan rUspIzk 34aSQ7k
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Potential Pagination Issue/ Duplicate content issue
Hi All, We upgraded our framework , relaunched our site with new url structures etc and re did our site map to Google last week. However, it's now come to light that the rel=next, rel=Prev tags we had in place on many of our pages are missing. We are putting them back in now but my worry is , as they were previously missing when we submitted the , will I have duplicate content issues or will it resolve itself , as Google re-crawls the site over time ?.. Any advice would be greatly appreciated? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Scraping / Duplicate Content Question
Hi All, I understanding the way to protect content such as a feature rich article is to create authorship by linking to your Google+ account. My Question
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
You have created a webpage that is informative but not worthy to be an article, hence no need create authorship in Google+
If a competitor comes along and steals this content word for word, something similar, creates their own Google+ page, can you be penalised? Is there any way to protect yourself without authorship and Google+? Regards Mark0 -
Tabs and duplicate content?
We own this site http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/ and just a little concerned as I right clicked open in new tab on the tab content section and it went to a new page For example if you right click on the price tab and click open in new tab you will end up with the url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson
http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/#tabThree Does this mean that our content is being duplicated onto another page? If so what should I do?0 -
Best practice with duplicate content. Cd
Our website has recently been updated, now it seems that all of our products pages look like this cdnorigin.companyname.com/catagory/product Google is showing these pages within the search. rather then companyname.com/catagory/product Each product page does have a canaonacal tag on that points to the cdnorigin page. Is this best practice? i dont think that cdnorigin.companyname etc looks very goon in the search. is there any reason why my designer would set the canonical tags up this way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Duplicate content mess
One website I'm working with keeps a HTML archive of content from various magazines they publish. Some articles were repeated across different magazines, sometimes up to 5 times. These articles were also used as content elsewhere on the same website, resulting in up to 10 duplicates of the same article on one website. With regards to the 5 that are duplicates but not contained in the magazine, I can delete (resulting in 404) all but the highest value of each (most don't have any external links). There are hundreds of occurrences of this and it seems unfeasible to 301 or noindex them. After seeing how their system works I can canonical the remaining duplicate that isn't contained in the magazine to the corresponding original magazine version - but I can't canonical any of the other versions in the magazines to the original. I can't delete the other duplicates as they're part of the content of a particular issue of a magazine. The best thing I can think of doing is adding a link in the magazine duplicates to the original article, something along the lines of "This article originally appeared in...", though I get the impression the client wouldn't want to reveal that they used to share so much content across different magazines. The duplicate pages across the different magazines do differ slightly as a result of the different Contents menu for each magazine. Do you think it's a case of what I'm doing will be better than how it was, or is there something further I can do? Is adding the links enough? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0