Best Practice For Multisite Targeting Different States With Same Content

[MatShepSEO]

I am auditing a Joomla website that uses the MightySites component to create multiple versions of the same site for different state/province areas. For example, the site structure looks something like:

example.com/fl/
example.com/mn/
example.com/ny/
example.com/wa/

etc.

Each of the state home pages are largely identical and much of the content within each state sub-folder is a copy of the original content on the main example.com site, with minor changes here and there. The client is a national organization and needs to keep this structure to allow each state to be able to edit and change their own content, though as far as I can see content doesn't actually vary much.

What's best practice here in reducing duplicate content issues? We can't use hreflang as it is all within one country (although it does also provide two different language versions of content, for which I will use hreflang.) Should we just canonical everything back to the corresponding pages on the example.com site?

Any thoughts or recommendations much appreciated.

[Chris_Hickman]

I imagine the goal for duplicating the site is to have each state indexed in search. If this is the case, you'll want to create unique content for each state page. To go one step further, you might want to consider adding a unique image and title tag for each state and acquire their own relevant backlinks. Best of luck.

[JaredCarrizales]

It sounds like first you would need to know how the other states are using their sites (folders). This will help you answer the canonical vs. unique content question.

For example, if the individual states are going put their own marketing efforts behind their piece of the site, you definitely don't want to canonical their section as power would be transferred away. However, if they're not actively marketing their section (building links, blogging, whatever), AND your client doesn't mind the individual states not having a lot of ranking power, then I'd say using canonicals within each section is a viable option.

Let's assume that for whatever reason you can't use canonicals. Then it seems like you can either 1) suggest some type of plan for the states to start building out their own content in their areas so content is more unique all the way around, or 2) have the association (or you) do it themselves. Regardless, there's elbow grease involved.