Reusing content owned by the client on websites for other locations?
-
Hello All!
Newbie here, so I'm working through some of my questions
I do have two major question regarding duplicate content:
_Say a medical hospital has 4 locations, and chooses to create 4 separate websites. Each website would have the same design, but different NAP, and contact info, etc. Essentially, we'd be looking at creating their own branded template. _
My question 1.) If the hospitals all offer similar services, with roughly the same nav, does it make sense to have multiple websites? I figure this makes the most sense in terms of optimizing for their differing locations.
2.) If the hospital owns the content on the first site, I'm assuming it is still necessary to change it duplicates for the other properties? Or is it possible to differentiate between the duplication of owned content from other instances of content duplication?
Everyone has been fantastic here so far, looking forward to some feedback!
-
I agree with both Andrea and Miriam in that the best-case scenario would be one site that provides links and information to different locations, provided the branding and business model support that of course.
-
You're welcome Tyler. I think Andrea has a good suggestion below too.
-
Hi Tyler,
Does the hospital have one name or four? In other words, is the whole hospital chain called St. Joseph's Hospital, or is one St. Joseph's Urgent Care, while another is Goldman-St. Joseph's and another is St. Joseph's Memorial, etc. ? If only one, and all four hospitals are administered by the same ruling body, then I would almost always suggest creating just one website if this were my Local SEO/design client.
With this approach, each of the hospital branches can be given a location landing page with unique content on it (most importantly, the unique complete contact information for each branch) and these pages will not duplicate one another in any way. Then, all the rest of the site content goes to the good of the overall brand, and there is no problem with duplication because each page is occurring only once rather than possibly occurring 4 times on 4 different websites.
Also, by making one site the official source of info for the brand, you reduce the risk of Google+ merges/dupes.
If, for some reason, the governing body insists on having 4 different websites instead of 1, then, yes, you must be sure that the content is unique on each website to avoid duplicate content.
-
I'd actually go a different route and do one site with separate pages for each location. It'dbe better for the overall issue of content/avoiding duplicate which can become a huge issue. Four sites is a lot more to manage and track and keep up and running.
But it depends on what the online strategy is, too. Google is constantly working to get localized results, too, so it's not as though there has to be four totally independent sites to get results targeted to a certain neighborhood.
I'm not saying this is the best site ever, but one hospital network that comes to mind, Beaumont, has theirs set up this way: http://www.beaumont.edu/
-
Hi Dana,
Thanks for the reply! You are correct in that I'm not directly employed by these clients. I'm guessing our best option would just be using a similar base, and reworking the content enough as to differentiate.
The difficult part comes when all the locations will offer the same services. We'll just be tasked with coming up with new ways to say the same things. Home/About Us wouldn't be tricky because that makes unique content creation a bit easier.
Thank you for your quick reply!
-
Hi Tyler,
Here's a partial answer. I am not a specialist in local SEO so you might get some more detailed ideas if some of those folks chime in on this one.
It seems to me you only have two options. One is to create unique content for each hospital. The other, doing as you suggest an using content created oin one site and re-using it on another is only going to work if you use canonicalization properly. The downside for that is the site with the canonical tag is going to get credit for that content and the site without the canonical tag isn't. You could be fragmenting good content in ways you may never have envisioned when you began. The result could be that one hospital site does way better than another in the SERPs.
I would encourage your clients (I am assuming these hospitals are clients and that you aren't directly employed by them), encourage them to express to you what is special about each of those hospitals. What differentiates them from other hospitals in the same area, and perhaps even from each other. This is the harder, but better route I think.
I hope that helps a little!
Dana
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
-
Duplicate Content and Subdirectories
Hi there and thank you in advance for your help! I'm seeking guidance on how to structure a resources directory (white papers, webinars, etc.) while avoiding duplicate content penalties. If you go to /resources on our site, there is filter function. If you filter for webinars, the URL becomes /resources/?type=webinar We didn't want that dynamic URL to be the primary URL for webinars, so we created a new page with the URL /resources/webinar that lists all of our webinars and includes a featured webinar up top. However, the same webinar titles now appear on the /resources page and the /resources/webinar page. Will that cause duplicate content issues? P.S. Not sure if it matters, but we also changed the URLs for the individual resource pages to include the resource type. For example, one of our webinar URLs is /resources/webinar/forecasting-your-revenue Thank you!
Technical SEO | | SAIM_Marketing0 -
Slow website
Hi I have just migrated from a custom written php/mysql site to a site using wordpress and woocommerce. I couldnt believe the drop in speed . I am using a few plugins for wordpress - contact forms / social sharing. and I have a few woocommerce plugins for taking payment etc. I am hosting images css's and js's on W3 Total Cache and MAXCDN hoping to speed the site up but tools at http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt sometimes show that the time between browser request and reply can be between 1 and 15 secs. I have searched all day looking for a post I read about two months ago with a tool that seems to look at server responce and redirect processing etc hoping it would help but cant find it. If anyone knows what I am talking about I would appreciate them posting a link The site is http://www.synergy-health.co.uk and an example of an inner page is http://www.synergy-health.co.uk/home/shop/alacer-emergen-c-1000-mg-vitamin-c-acai-berry-30-packets-8-4-g-each/ Any suggestions please? Perhaps I have w3total cache set wrong? Also, as the has been tanked and is in freefal iin google ranking since January would this be a good time to change the structure of Url from home/shop/product to domain.name/brand/product? Thanks in advance !
Technical SEO | | StephenCallaghan0 -
Website is not indexed in Google
Hi Guys, I have a problem with a website from a customer. His website is not indexed in Google (except for the homepage). I could not find anything that can possibly be the cause. I already checked the robots.txt, sitemap, and plugins on the website. In the HTML code i also couldn't find anything which makes indexing harder than usual. This is the website i am talking about: http://www.xxxx.nl/ (Dutch) The only thing that i am guessing now is the Google sandbox, but even that is quite unlikely. I hope you guys discover something i could not find! Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | B.Great0 -
Duplicate content vs. less content
Hi, I run a site that is currently doing very well in google for the terms that we want. We are 1,2 or 3 for our 4 targeted terms, but havent been able to jump to number one in two categories that I would really like to. In looking at our site, I didn't realize we have a TON of duplicate content as seen by SEO moz and I guess google. It appears to be coming from our forum, we use drupal. RIght now we have over 4500 pages of duplicate content. Here is my question: How much is this hurting us as we are ranking high. Is it better to kill the forum (which is more community service than business) and have a very tight site SEO-wise, or leave the forum even with the duplicate content. Thanks for your help. Erik
Technical SEO | | SurfingNosara0 -
Duplicate content
I have two page, where the second makes a duplicate content from the first Example:www.mysite.com/mypagewww.mysite.com/mysecondpageIf i insert still making duplicate content?Best regards,Wendel
Technical SEO | | peopleinteractive0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi within my campaigns i get an error "crawl errors found" that says duplicate page content found, it finds the same content on the home pages below. Are these seen as two different pages? And how can i correct these errors as they are just one page? http://poolstar.net/ http://poolstar.net/Home_Page.php
Technical SEO | | RouteAccounts0 -
Different TLD's same content - duplicate content? - And a problem in foreign googles?
Hi, Operating from the Netherlands with customers troughout Europe we have for some countries the same content. In the netherlands and Belgium Dutch is spoken and in Germany and Switserland German is spoken. For these countries the same content is provided. Does Google see this as duplicate content? Could it be possible that a german customer gets the Swiss website as a search result when googling in the German Google? Thank you for your assistance! kind regards, Dennis Overbeek Dennis@acsi.eu
Technical SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
Duplicate content
This is just a quickie: On one of my campaigns in SEOmoz I have 151 duplicate page content issues! Ouch! On analysis the site in question has duplicated every URL with "en" e.g http://www.domainname.com/en/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ http://www.domainname.com/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ Personally my thoughts are that are rel = canonical will sort this issue, but before I ask our dev team to add this, and get various excuses why they can't I wanted to double check i am correct in my thinking? Thanks in advance for your time
Technical SEO | | Yozzer0