Duplicate Content, Same Company?
-
Hello Moz Community,
I am doing work for a company and they have multiple locations.
For example, examplenewyork.com, examplesanfrancisco.com, etc.
They also have the same content on certain pages within each website.
For example, examplenewyork.com/page-a has the same content as examplesanfrancisco.com/page-a
Does this duplicate content negatively impact us? Or could we rank for each page within each location parameter (for example, people in new york search page-a would see our web page and people in san fran search page-a would see our web page)?
I hope this is clear.
Thanks,
Cole
-
Thanks all.
-
Sorry, I lost track of the fact that you were talking about dupe content on multiple domains, vs. on the same domain. The same logic basically applies. However, when you're talking about essentially duplicating entire domains registered to the same owner, there can be somewhat more of a risk that the original content gets discounted (or in such cases, penalized) along with the duplicate.
If you have a main site that seems to be doing OK in the search results, you may consider keeping that domain and it's content, while eliminating/redirecting the other domains and revising their content for use on the domain you're keeping.
-
Chris makes a fantastic point here.
You almost need to detach "what's reasonable" from what Google wants sometimes. Chris is right - why shouldn't those two pages have the same content? But we're dealing with algorithms mainly, not reasoning.
-
Cole,
I'm going to say roughly the same thing as the soon-to-be-guru Tom but give you somewhat of a different spin on it.
It's completely understandable that anyone with a website would feel that the the content applicable to one city would also apply to another city as well, so what's the harm in just switching out the city names? There shouldn't be really, and in most cases there is no actual harm, in it.
However, while Google's search engine makes it possible for customers in multiple cities to actually be able to seek out and find content you've "tailored" to them, it also makes it possible for other marketers to do the same as you've done--thus competition for keywords increases dramatically. On a small scale, google doesn't want to penalize, per se, a whole site for such practices, but it does want to differentiate that which might be original content from that which might be duplicates of the original and in doing so, be able to rank the original, while discounting duplicates.
To get around this "hurdle" you have to treat each of your pages as unique entities with unique values to each of your target markets. That way, content for each page ends up being unique and Google's algorithm can prioritize all the competitors' pages uniformly according to how relevant and valuable they are to the target audience.
-
Hey Cole
-
The more you do change, the less risk involved. Some might tell you that if you change the content enough to pass "copyscape" or other online plagiarism tools, that would protect you from a penalty. I find that to be slightly ridiculous - why would Google judge by those external standards? The more you can change, the better in my opinion (but I can totally sympathise with the work that entails)
-
Google will know you own the websites if you link them together, share GA code, host them together, contain the same company details and so on - but my question is why would you want to do that? I think if you tried to tell Google you owned all the sites they would come out you even harder, as they could see it as you being manipulative.
To that point, others will recommend that you only use one domain and target different KWs or locations on different pages/subfolders/subdomains, as it'll look less like a link network. Downside of that is getting Google local listings for each page/location can be a bit of a pain if the pages all come from one domain.
It's not really my place to comment on your strategy and what you should/should not be doing, but suffice to say if you go with individual domains for each location, you should aim to make those domains (and their copy) as unique and independent as possible.
-
-
Hey Tom,
The keywords we are competing for aren't very competitive.
Two follow up questions:
1.) To what length should we change the content? For example, is it a matter of a few words (location based) or is it more of altering each content on the page. I guess my question deals with the scope of the content change.
2.) Is there a way to let Google know we own all the websites? I had href lang in mind here. This may not be possible; I just wanted to ask.
Tom, thanks so much for your help.
Cole
-
Hi Cole
That kind of duplication will almost certainly negatively impact your ability to rank.
It's the kind of dupe content that Google hates - the kind that's deliberately manipulative and used by sites just trying to rank for as many different KWs or locations as possible, without trying to give people a unique user experience.
Not to say that you couldn't possibly rank like this (I've seen it happen and will probably see it again in the future), but you're leaving yourself wide open to a Panda penalty and, as such, I'd highly recommend that you cater each site and each landing page to your particular audience. Even by doing that, not only will you be making it unique but you would dramatically improve your chances of ranking by mentioning local things for a local page.
Give each page unique copy and really tailor it to your local audience.
Hope this helps.
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
Hello Moz Quick question. Can I copy and paste a paragraph of text (100 words) from my main category page into my products without hurting SEO of the category page? The content on my category page is so good I don't want to take chances as this is what I will be ranking for. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | crocman0 -
PDF Instructions come up in Crawl report as Duplicate Content
Hello, My ecommerce site has many PDF instruction pages that are being marked as duplicate content in the site crawl. Each page has a different title, and then a PDF displayed in an iframe with a link back to the previous page & to the category that the product is placed in. Should I add text to the pages to help differentiate them? I included a screenshot of the code that is on all the pages. Thanks! Justin 9tD9HMr
On-Page Optimization | | JustinBSLW0 -
How to remove duplicate content issues for thin page(containing oops no resulting found)
In this scenarios we have multiple different URLs but the page content is rendering same (containing Oops message) due to which content duplicate's issue arises.As soon as content for these URL,s are available then those pages duplicate issue will removed. So we want to remove duplicate issue not the page & Page URLs.
On-Page Optimization | | surabhi60 -
Duplicate Page Content Should we 301 - Best Practices?
What would be the best way to avoid a Duplicate Page Content for these type of pages. Our website generates user friendly urls, for each page..
On-Page Optimization | | 365ToursSafaris
So it is the same exact page, just both versions of the url work.. Example: http://www.safari365.com/about-africa/wildebeest-migration http://www.safari365.com/wildebeest-migration I don't think adding code to the page will work because its the same page for the incorrect and correct versions of the page. I don't think i can use the URL parameter setting because the version with /about-africa/ is the correct (correct as it it follows the site navigation) I was thinking of using the htaccess to redirect to the correct version.. Will that work ? and does it follow best Practices ? any other suggestions that would work better ?0 -
Duplicate URL for homepage
Hi Gurus, Thank you for reading this question My site is developed in Classic ASP How can i make sure the homepage is not duplicated for http://www.partyrama.co.uk/ http://www.partyrama.co.uk/default.asp http://partyrama.co.uk/ http://partyrama.co.uk/default.asp Regards Sri
On-Page Optimization | | partyrama0 -
Does schema.org assist with duplicate content concerns
The issue of duplicate content has been well documented and there are lots of articles suggesting to noindex archive pages in WordPress powered sites. Schema.org allows us to mark-up our content, including marking a components URL. So my question simply, is no-indexing archive (category/tag) pages still relevant when considering duplicate content? These pages are in essence a list of articles, which can be marked as an article or blog posting, with the url of the main article and all the other cool stuff the scheme gives us. Surely Google et al are smart enough to recognise these article listings as gateways to the main content, therefore removing duplicate content concerns. Of course, whether or not doing this is a good idea will be subjective and based on individual circumstances - I'm just interested in whether or not the search engines can handle this appropriately.
On-Page Optimization | | MarkCA0 -
Duplication About PDF Files on Website
Hello, My site's URL (web address) is: http://www.vostastores.com/ Above is the Our Website URL. We are in the process of Upgrading Our Website and for that we are adding all Details of each and every products. One of the thing that we are planning to do is to get Manufacturer's product PDF files on our Website which the manufacturer already have on their website. So our Question is that Since the manufacturer has the file on their website and we want to add the same on our website, Will be there any Duplication issue? If yes, then please provide us with a Solution by which we can add the same on our website. Thanks & Regards.
On-Page Optimization | | CommercePundit0 -
Split testing and dupe content
Hi Everyone, good to be here. I'd like to do split testing in Adwords, currently with a clients site we are selling from a normal site with navigation. The site has about 5 specific products, I want to dupe one of the products and create a funnel without navigation distractions right to checkout. Then A/B test the same product pages in Adwords, one with nav and one without. Will the dupe content be ignored do you think? I'm only slightly concerned as the product pages rank well at the moment.
On-Page Optimization | | eonicWeb0