How to Handle Franchise Duplicate Content

[TriMarkDigital]

My agency handles digital marketing for about 80 Window World stores, each with separate sites. For the most part, the content across all of these sites is the exact same, though we have slowly but surely been working through getting new, unique content up on some of the top pages over the past year. These pages include resource pages and specific product pages. I'm trying to figure out the best temporary solution as we go through this process. Previously, we have tried to keep the pages we knew were duplicates from indexing, but some pages have still managed to slip through the cracks during redesigns.

• Would canonicals be the route to go? (do keep in mind that there isn't necessarily one "original version," so there isn't a clear answer as to which page/site all the duplicated pages should point to)
• Should we just continue to use robots.txt/noindex for all duplicate pages for now?
• Any other recommendations?

Thanks in advance!

[RuthBurrReedy]

It sounds like you are already doing as well as you can - since there's no clear canonical page, noindexing the duplicate pages would probably be the way to go. Don't panic if you see some duplicate pages still sneak into the index after you've noindexed them; this is common and it's unlikely that Google will see this as a Panda-worthy problem on your part.

The one drawback to noindexing the pages is that when unique content is up on them, and they are ready to be indexed, it may take a while for Google to get the message that this page is supposed to be indexed now. I've seen it take anywhere from an hour to a week for a page to appear in the index. One thing you can do in the meantime is make sure each site is accruing some good links - not an easy task with 80 websites, I know, but the higher authority will help out once the unique content is ready to go. Sounds like a herculean task - good luck!

[TriMarkDigital]

Solid insight, but unfortunately we do have the 80 websites because the owners of the store manage each separately. Some stores offer different products or services than others and are completely separate entities. Each store owner that we work with is an individual client; we do not work with corporate. Plus, since we don't do marketing for ALL stores in the entire franchise, just a large chunk of them, one big site just wouldn't work. Also, it's really not possible for us to make all these store owners write their own content for the entire site.

We really appreciate your thought on this and totally agree with your logic, but unfortunately would not be able to implement either solution. Right now, we just need some kind of bandaid solution to utilize as we work through rewriting the most important pages on the site (probably either de-indexing them or some kind of canonical strategy).

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

Important question ... why does the company have 80 websites? Are they being individually managed by the owner of each store, or are they all in the control of the central company?

If the latter, what you are describing is a strong illustration supporting the typical advice that it is generally better to build 1 powerhouse website for your brand than a large number of thin, weak, duplicative sites.

If this company was my client, I would be earnestly urging them to consolidate everything into a single site. If they are currently investing in maintaining 80 website, there's reason to hope that they've got the funding to develop a strong, unique landing page for each of the 80 locations on their main corporate website, and redirect the old sites to the central one. Check out how REI.com surfaces unique pages for all of their locations. It's inspiring how they've made each page unique. If your client could take a similar approach, they'd be on a better road for the future.

You would, of course, need to update all citations to point to the landing pages once you had developed them.

If, however, the 80 websites are being controlled by 80 different franchise location managers, what needs to be developed here is a policy that prevents these managers from taking the content of the corporation. If they want to each run a separate website, they need to take on the responsibility of creating their own content. And, of course, the corporate website needs to be sure it doesn't have internal duplicate content and is not taking content from its franchise managers, either. 80 separate websites should = 80 totally separate efforts. That's a lot to have going on, pointing back to the preferred method of consolidation wherever possible.

Hope this helps!