Competitors and Duplicate Content

[DeliaAssociates]

I'm curious to get people's opinion on this.

One of our clients (Company A) has a competitor that's using duplicate sites to rank.  They're using "www.companyA.com" and "www.CompanyAIndustryTown.com" (actually, several of the variations).  It's basically duplicate content, with maybe a town name inserted or changed somewhere on the page.  I was always told that this is not a wise idea.  They started doing this in the past month or so when they had a site redesign.  So far, it's working pretty well for them.  So, here's my questions:

-Would you address this directly (report to Google, etc.)?

-Would you ignore this?

-Do you think it's going to backfire soon?

There's another company (Company B) that's using another practice- using separate pages on their domain to address different towns, and using those as landing pages.  Similar, in that a lot of the content is the same, just some town names and minor details changed.  All on the same domain though.  Would the same apply to that?

Thanks for your insight!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

The only long lasting way to rank for local specific pages is to offer truly unique content on those pages, and build unique links to those pages.

The two methods you mentioned here, using near duplicate sites and pages, may work for a short time or in non-competitive niches. It may also work somewhat if a very strong link profile is backing it up... but in general these sorts of tricks usually result in a drop in rankings. If not now, then during an upcoming algorythm change.

Often times, misguided webmasters think they are doing the right thing in launching these sites and pages, and no ill intent is intended. Unless the pages are obviously spam or doorway pages, then in my opinion it's probably not worth it reporting them to Google, but that decision is of course best left to each individual.

Read more about doorway pages: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355

Consider how Yelp has 100s of pages about dentist, at least one page for every major city in America. Although the pages are similar, they are each filled with unique content and all have unique links pointing to them. Each delivers a similar message, but provides unique value based on that particular location.

Add unique value to each location specific page, and you're doing great.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Unfortunately, this isn't a method likely to work.

Most of the time, if you insert canonical tags on near similar pages, and Google interprets those canonical correctly, then they tend to index and rank the page that the canonical points to. So all of those other pages would have little or no search engine visibility whatsoever.

Not a good technique if you're trying to rank individual pages.

[MSWD]

So ARE you suggesting that for local city pages that you add the canonical tag to point to the home page?

I guess I'm a little confused on this as Adam is?

Can you explain your thoughts behind this?

[DeliaAssociates]

So let me clarify then, if they have (on same domain) multiple pages with near duplicate content, mostly changing names of cities, but use rel:canonical, they will still have the SEO benefit of ranking for different towns, but it won't be seen as duplicate content?

And then the multiple domain situation...that's just a wait and see.

[HughesDigital]

The pages with the city specific information but similar content are pretty much the perfect space for a canonical tag.  If you feel that they haven't been penalized, then this is probably the method they are using for hosting the same content.

[W3designer]

here is an example of sites that have been using duplicate content with a few word changes

http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-exact-match-domains-flagged-by-google-need-help-reinclusion

[W3designer]

Having multiple sites with duplicate content is a bad idea as it affects your search engine rankings. The company is likely to be using bad SEO practice and soon google bots will pick this up and the domain will get penalised.

You can report to Google, but in most cases Google picks up sites that are using bad SEO techniques.

There is no harm in using separate pages on domains name to address they operate in different towns as this helps the site being found for local searches, but having content that is again duplicated and only a few words changed Google will pick this up.

Always remember Content is KING!