Duplicate content on charity website
-
Hi Mozers,
We are working on a website for a UK charity – they are a hospice and have two distinct brands, one for their adult services and another for their children’s services.
They currently have two different websites which have a large number of pages that contain identical text. We spoke with them and agreed that it would be better to combine the websites under one URL – that way a number of the duplicate pages could be reduced as they are relevant to both brands.
What seamed like a good idea initially is beginning to not look so good now. We had planned to use CSS to load different style sheets for each brand – depending on the referring URL (adult / Child) the page would display the appropriate branding. This will will work well up to a point.
What we can’t work out is how to style the page if it is the initial landing page – the brands are quite different and we need to get this right. It is not such an issue for the management type pages (board of trustees etc) as they govern both identities.
The issue is the donation, fundraising pages – they need to be found, and we are concerned that users will be confused if one of those pages is the initial landing page and they are served the wrong brand. We have thought of making one page the main page and using rel canonical on the other one, but that will affect its ability to be found in the search engines.
Really not sure what the best way to move forward would be, any suggestions / guidance would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Fraser
.
-
Hi Fraser
Thanks for the info! Without being too intimately involved, based upon this description - it sounds like keeping two separate sites would have been perfectly fine. It seems like there'd be least user confusion (and much easier maintenance for you) with two sites. As mentioned the duplicate content issue is more of a myth as far as causing penalties in this situation.
However with that said - this doesn't mean you wouldn't want to mitigate against keeping the sites as unique as possible. You'd want to customize the content as much as you could for each site. I'd imagine because they are so different in real life, this wouldn't be hard to do - unique text, photos, design, etc.
Also - from looking at the sitemap, I don't think every one of those pages would be "landing pages" for commercial search terms. That's really the only issue I'd worry about - if you did have duplicate pages that were competing with one another to rank for the same keyword - but it doesn't sound like that's the case here.
-
What CMS are you using?
If the pages are loading the style sheets globally, can you just use a class/id for the body of adult and child pages then use these classes for setting the different styles:
.child-template .container-div { }
.adult-template .container-div { }
Then you can have the layout/page structure under the one URL with different styles.
-
Hi Dan,
Each site has around 65 pages with around 55% being shared between the two sites (duplicates).
In the real world the services it is one governing charity with two distinct brands. They both operate out of the same location, but have separate parts of the building. They have different names, distinct branding and each entity has its own social media accounts.
They cater for two distinct user groups – they look after people that are terminally ill EV is the adult service and JG is the children’s service. This is why the branding is so different with EV having an adult theme and JG having a child friendly theme as it is not only catering to patents but also to siblings.
It was the quantity of duplicate pages that initially concerned us which is why we wanted to move to a one site option. I have uploaded the separate navigation structures to imager which hopefully will make things clearer.
Thanks again
Fraser
-
Few questions:
- How many pages are each site separately?
- How many pages of those are duplicates? (ie: looking for % of pages duplicate vs not)
- In the "real-world" how distinct are the two services? Different locations? Different names, logos, legal business entities?
- Do the two services serve two distinctly different customers? ie: would the same person ever be a customer of both places?
- What about other things like social media - different accounts for each one?
I should clarify too, that "duplicate content" as a penalty is a myth. The angle I would really approach this, would be from UX - what makes it easiest for users to find/understand/navigate the two services and not be confused? Some answers to the questions above would help!
-
I don't know if the brand differences need to be disparate, but one option would be to just have one page for both - not different versions, but just always one page. You could add content that makes clear the page refers to both brands, and even generate new, rich content for it - while, on donation forms and landing pages, having a step or form-field that allows the user to choose which they're interested in.
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
-
Minimising the effects of duplicate content
Hello, We realised that one of our clients, copied a large part of content from our website to his. The normal reaction would be to send a cease and desist letter. Nevertheless this would probably mean loosing a good client. The client dumped the text of several articles (for example:
Technical SEO | | Lvet
http://www.velascolawyers.com/en/property-law/136-the-ley-de-costas-coastal-law.html ) Into the same page:
http://www.freundlinger-partners.com/en/home/faqs-property-law/ I convinced the client to place our authorship tags on this page, but I am wondering if this is enough. What do you think? Cheers
Luca0 -
Duplicate Content due to CMS
The biggest offender of our website's duplicate content is an event calendar generated by our CMS. It creates a page for every day of every year, up to the year 2100. I am considering some solutions: 1. Include code that stops search engines from indexing any of the calendar pages 2. Keep the calendar but re-route any search engines to a more popular workshops page that contains better info. (The workshop page isn't duplicate content with the calendar page). Are these solutions possible? If so, how do the above affect SEO? Are there other solutions I should consider?
Technical SEO | | ycheung0 -
Localized domains and duplicate content
Hey guys, In my company we are launching a new website and there's an issue it's been bothering me for a while. I'm sure you guys can help me out. I already have a website, let's say ABC.com I'm preparing a localized version of that website for the uk so we'll launch ABC.co.uk Basically the websites are going to be exactly the same with the difference of the homepage. They have a slightly different proposition. Using GeoIP I will redirect the UK traffic to ABC.co.uk and the rest of the traffic will still visit .com website. May google penalize this? The site itself it will be almost the same but the homepage. This may count as duplicate content even if I'm geo-targeting different regions so they will never overlap. Thanks in advance for you advice
Technical SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
Testing for duplicate content and title tags
Hi there, I have been getting both Duplicate Page content and Duplicate Title content warnings on my crawl diagnostics report for one of my campaigns. I did my research, and implemented the preferred domain setting in Webmaster Tools. This did not resolve the crawl diagnostics warnings, and upon further research I discovered the preferred domain would only be noted by Google and not other bots like Roger. My only issue was that when I ran an SEOmoz crawl test on the same domain, I saw none of the duplicate content or title warnings yet they still appear on my crawl diagnostics report. I have now implemented a fix in my .htaccess file to 301 redirect to the www. domain. I want to check if it's worked, but since the crawl test did not show the issue last time I don't think I can rely on that. Can you help please? Thanks, Claire
Technical SEO | | SEOvet0 -
Duplicate Content on 2 Sites - Advice
We have one client who has an established eCommerce Site and has created another site which has the exact same content which is about to be launched. We want both sites to be indexed but not be penalised for duplicate content. The sites have different domains The sites have the same host We want the current site to be priority, so the new site would not be ranking higher in SERPs. Any advice on setting up canonical, author tags, alternate link tag etc Thanks Rich
Technical SEO | | SEOLeaders0 -
Duplicate content
I have just ran a report in seomoz on my domain and has noticed that there are duplicate content issues, the issues are: www.domainname/directory-name/ www.domainname/directory-name/index.php All my internal links and external links point to the first domain, as i prefer this style as it looks clear & concise, however doing this has created duplicate content as within the site itself i have an index.php page inside this /directory-name/ to show the page. Could anyone give me some advice on what i should do please? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Hello, We have many pages in our crawler report that are showing duplicate content. However, the content is not duplicateon the pages. It is somewhat close, but different. I am not sure how to fix the problem so it leaves our report. Here is an example. It is showing these as duplicate content to each other. www.soccerstop.com/c-119-womens.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-120-youth.aspx www.soccerstop.com/c-124-adult.aspx Any help you could provide would be most appreciated. I am going through our crawler report and resolving issues, and this seems to be big one for us with lots in the report, but not sure what to do about it. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SoccerStop
James0 -
Duplicate content connundrum
Hey Mozzers- I have a tricky situation with one of my clients. They're a reputable organization and have been mentioned in several major news articles. They want to create a Press page on their site with links to each article, but they want viewers to remain within the site and not be redirected to the press sites themselves. The other issue is some of the articles have been removed from the original press sites where they were first posted. I want to avoid duplicate content issues, but I don't see how to repost the articles within the client's site. I figure I have 3 options: 1. create PDFs (w/SEO-friendly URLs) with the articles embedded in them that open in a new window. 2. Post an image with screenshot of article on a unique URL w/brief content. 3. Copy and paste the article to a unique URL. If anyone has experience with this issue or any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. Jaime Brown
Technical SEO | | JamesBSEO0