Duplicate content issue for franchising business
-
Hi All
We are in the process of adding a franchise model to our exisitng stand alone business and as part of the package given to the franchisee will be a website with conent identical to our existing website apart from some minor details such as contact and address details.
This creates a huge duplicate content issue and even if we implement a cannonical approach to this will still be unfair to the franchisee in terms of their markeitng and own SEO efforts.
The url for each franchise will be unique but the content will be the same to a large extend. The nature of the service we offer (professional qualificaitons) is such that the "products" can only be described in a certain way and it will be near on in impossible to have a unique set of "product" pages for each franchisee.
I hope that some of you have come across a similar problem or that some of you have suggestions or ideas for us to get round this.
Kind regards
Peter
-
I agree Andrew it has been a good discussion - that is the great thing about this community you can actually bounce ideas off like minded folks that have knowledge and understanding of what you are doing. I think it also shows that there are always several ways to go about things - it is like this discussion it has really got me thinking and I think that can only be a good thing! Thanks
-
good discussion Matt! and your right about creating our own kitchen content.
-
Yeah I agree with that Andrew - it is always best to work on one site and build its strength rather than lots of microsites - however lots brands that have franchises have standalone websites from the main brand and they do well with SEO. Peter stated above that new franchises will get their own website with identical content, except contact details etc, so it is still essential to work on unique content which will help gaining links and more.
Maybe Peter would consider your sub-directory suggestion as an alternative but I think as Egol says he should be demanding about those that take on a franchise creating unique content that will fit in with the brand, benefiting everyone involved.
I don't think you can get away from the fact that creating unique, decent content is the way forward with this - after all you know what they say content is king!
-
Well, if you break out a site into individual franchise sites... your relying on the individual franchises to rank for SEO. All new sites, all starting from scratch whenever they sign on as a franchise. If you use the method of one site using sub-directories.. you have the benefit of building an ongoing SEO powerhouse.
Further strengthening the franchise.
This is something to consider too, right?
-
Hi Andrew - I understand what you are referring to when you use the term skinning and I have seen several sites use this in relation to franchises. I came across this in the past when working for a motor group that had several car manufacturer franchises. However rather than use this option at the time we created unique content written by ourselves in relation to the makes and models, adding user reviews, etc. I found that we out ranked those using the skinning method. Also one question - do you mean that a menu option on your website actually takes you straight to the main manufacturer domain rather than containing information on your own page? If this is the case I think that you will be loosing out from a search point of view as there is no content to be linked to your site in relation to this kitchen refacing - essentially your site for this product is just a gateway page. If people find the kitchen refacing page from the manufacturer in the search engines they will be taken to their site and not yours - if I were you I would look at creating some content of my own as it will benefit you in the long run. Skinning doesn't allow you to control the on-page elements such as title tags etc. Keeping content on your site for instance would allow you to target a local area in the search engines in relation to this franchise - so you might have thiels kitchen refacing in (location).
-
Maybe the term "skinning" was the wrong term or process. I apologize if I've given wrong information.
Have you looked into what other franchise opportunities are doing?
I did a search for "handyman baltimore"
front page of google brought back two franchises using the idea I was trying to express.
go to www(dot)handymanmatters(dot)com and type in a few different zip codes from different states. Same website, same franchise branding, different local experience.
go to www(dot)mrhandyman(dot)com and see how they are doing it.
Also, we've just signed up with a franchise opportunity for kitchen refacing. We're a large home improvement company and are just adding this to our site. But, when you go to our menu tab for kitchen refacing you actually go to thiels(dot)com/products/cabinets/ the difference? it's our branding that appears and not thiels. This is where the idea of skinning came from... probably the wrong term for the actual process.
Those were the options I was trying to express.
-
I don't believe there is any other way round this than creating unique content - you need to remember that search engines will strip away all the fancy layouts etc. and analyse your sites on a textual basis so if all the textual content is the same then you have duplicate content in their eyes! You also need to think about the long term aim of promoting both sites - taking time and effort to produce decent unique content will be far more beneficial!
-
Thank you all for taking the time so far to provide some suggestions and comments,
Can i just double check that there is no techinical way around this other than making the content for each site as unique as possible?
-
What is skinning?
Skinning is a concept where by a program user or website visitor is given control of how the program or website they are using, looks to them, by choosing from a selection of differing pre-made designs (or skins.)
From the user point of view they are able to tailor the way a program or website appears to them according to their tastes and makes for a very interactive experience.
So how does it work?
Well if we leave programs to one side and concentrate on websites, the very basic concept is that as a web designer you create however many HTML pages of content (text and editorial images) are neded for your site and then instead of just one CSS file that governs every style and design/positioning element of the site, you create any number of seperate CSS files which will style the HTML page a different way depending on which one is loaded.
When the user chooses from a selection of skins on your site one CSS file is swapped for another and the page appears to have been instantly redesigned. (the actual content remains the same, but the way it is presented (colours, fonts, structual images) can be swapped each time a new skin is selected (CSS file is loaded.)
I just copied that from the web, but I would make one main website and allow my franchises the ability to skin the website to give it there own local flavor.
-
I would make the development of some unique marketing statements that fit the community of the franchisee a required part of the franchise application.
This will force the franchisee to learn about the business, think about how it will work, how it should be perceived by the public and do that in the unique context of their community location.
Get this information and work out of them while they are still hungry for the opportunity.
Give them a template to make it easy. Then congratulate them on developing all of the information needed for their new website.
This will benefit both you and the franchisee.
I would be demanding about them doing a great job on this.
-
peter have you thought about including some unique testimonials on the products to dilute the duplicate content on the pages of the franchise? also how about rewriting the content with a different structure to your own. there are always ways to create unique content have you read the latest artical on seomoz by gianluca - maybe an option some content curation around the subject? you could also include different unique snippets from the course on both sites to make the content different. hope these ideas help!
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 solve our duplicate content issue? (Possible Session ID problem)
Hi there, We've recently took on a new developer who has no experience in any technical SEO and we're currently redesigning our site www.mrnutcase.com. Our old developer was up to speed on his SEO and any technical issues we never really had to worry about. I'm using Moz as a tool to go through crawl errors on an ad-hoc basis. I've noticed just now that we're recording a huge amount of duplicate content errors ever since the redesign commenced (amongst other errors)! For example, the following page is duplicated 100s of times: https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-US/designer/?CaseID=1128599&CollageID=21&ProductValue=2293 https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-US/designer/?CaseID=1128735&CollageID=21&ProductValue=3387 https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-GB/designer/?CaseID=1128510&CollageID=21&ProductValue=3364 https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-GB/designer/?CaseID=1128511&CollageID=21&ProductValue=3363 etc etc. Does anyone know how I should be dealing with this problem? And is this something that needs to be fixed urgently? This problem has never happened before so i'm hoping it's an easy enough fix. Look forward to your responses and greatly appreciate the help. Many thanks, Danny
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyNutcase0 -
Product Syndication and duplicate content
Hi, It's a duplicate content question. We sell products (vacation rental homes) on a number of websites as well as our own. Generally, these affiliate sites have a higher domain authority and much more traffic than our site. The product content (text, images, and often availability and rates) is pulled by our affiliates into their websites daily and is exactly the same as the content on our site, not including their page structure. We receive enquiries by email and any links from their domains to ours are nofollow. For example, all of the listing text on mysite.com/listing_id is identical to my-first-affiliate-site.com/listing_id and my-second-affiliate-site.com/listing_id. Does this count as duplicate content and, if so, can anyone suggest a strategy to make the best of the situation? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McCaldin0 -
Content Marketing for Local Businesses
Hey guys! As someone who works with a number of local businesses (with localized target markets) I find that developing ideas for content marketing can be VERY difficult. I like the idea of creating local guides, local event info etc, but what other ways can we create content for a localized target market? For example: I have an OBGYN client that we'd love to create content for that is related to their niche (women's health), but don't want to promote or create content for national audience. That would seem incredibly wasteful. Would love to hear ideas on how to create targeted content for a local audience! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
How can I remove duplicate content & titles from my site?
Without knowing I created multiple URLs to the same page destinations on my website. My ranking is poor and I need to fix this problem quickly. My web host doesn't understand the problem!!! How can I use canonical tags? Can somebody help, please.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZoeAlexander0 -
404 for duplicate content?
Sorry, I think this is my third question today... But I have a lot of duplicated content on my site. I use joomla so theres a lot of unintentional duplication. For example, www.mysite.com/index.php exists, etc. Up till now, I thought I had to 301 redirect or rel=canonical these "duplicated pages." However, can I just 404 it? Is there anything wrong with this rpactice in regards to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Adding a huge new product range to eCommerce site and worried about Duplicate Content
Hey all, We currently run a large eCommerce site that has around 5000 pages of content and ranks quite strongly for a lot of key search terms. We have just recently finalised a business agreement to incorporate a new product line that compliments our existing catalogue, but I am concerned about dumping this huge amount of content (that is sourced via an API) onto our site and the effect it might have dragging us down for our existing type of product. In regards to the best way to handle it, we are looking at a few ideas and wondered what SEOMoz thought was the best. Some approaches we are tossing around include: making each page point to the original API the data comes from as the canonical source (not ideal as I don't want to pass link juice from our site to theirs) adding "noindex" to all the new pages so Google simply ignores them and hoping we get side sales onto our existing product instead of trying to rank as the new range is highly competitive (again not ideal as we would like to get whatever organic traffic we can) manually rewriting each and every new product page's descriptions, tags etc. (a huge undertaking in terms of working hours given it will be around 4,400 new items added to our catalogue). Currently the industry standard seems to just be to pull the text from the API and leave it, but doing exact text searches shows that there are literally hundreds of other sites using the exact same duplicate content... I would like to persuade higher management to invest the time into rewriting each individual page but it would be a huge task and be difficult to maintain as changes continually happen. Sorry for the wordy post but this is a big decision that potentially has drastic effects on our business as the vast majority of it is conducted online. Thanks in advance for any helpful replies!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Duplicate content - canonical vs link to original and Flash duplication
Here's the situation for the website in question: The company produces printed publications which go online as a page turning Flash version, and as a separate HTML version. To complicate matters, some of the articles from the publications get added to a separate news section of the website. We want to promote the news section of the site over the publications section. If we were to forget the Flash version completely, would you: a) add a canonical in the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? b) add a link in the footer of the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? c) both of the above? d) something else? What if we add the Flash version into the mix? As Flash still isn't as crawlable as HTML should we noindex them? Is HTML content duplicated in Flash as big an issue as HTML to HTML duplication?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Duplicate Content, Campaign Explorer & Rel Canonical
Google Advises to use Rel Canonical URL's to advise them which page with similiar information is more relevant. You are supposed to put a rel canonical on the non-preferred pages to point back to the desired page. How do you handle this with a product catalog using ajax, where the additional pages do not exist? An example would be: <colgroup><col width="470"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eric_since1910.com
| .com/productcategory.aspx?page=1 /productcategory.aspx?page=2 /productcategory.aspx?page=3 /productcategory.aspx?page=4 The page=1,2,3 and 4 do not physically exist, they are simply referencing additional products I have rel canonical urls' on the main page www.examplesite.com/productcategory.aspx, but I am not 100% sure this is correct or how else it could be handled. Any Ideas Pro mozzers? |0