Intentional Duplicate Content - Great UX, Bad for Ranking?
-
I'll try to keep this as clear and high level as possible. Thank you in advance for any and all help!
We're managing a healthcare practice which specializes in neurosurgical treatments. As the practice is rather large, the doctors have several "specialties" in which they focus in, i.e. back surgery, facial surgery, brain surgery, etc.
They have a main website (examplepractice.com) which holds ALL of their content on each condition and treatment in which they deal with. So, if someone enters their main homepage they will see conditions and treatments for all the specialties categorized together.
However, linked within the main site are "mini-sites" for each specialty (same domain, same site) (examplepractice.com/brain-surgery), but with a different navigation menu to give the illusion of "separate website". These mini-sites are then tailored from a creative, content and UX perspective to THAT specific group of treatments and conditions. Now, anyone who enters this minisite will find information pertaining to only that specialty. The mini-sites are NOT set up as folders, but rather just a system of URLs that we have mapped out to each page.
We set up the pages this way to maintain an exclusive feel for the site. Instead of someone drilling into a specific condition and having the menu change, we created the copies. But, because of how this is set up, we now have duplicate content for each treatment and condition child page (one on the main site, one on the minisite).
My question (finally) is will this cause a problem in the future? Are we essentially splitting the "juice" between these two pages? Are we making it easier for our competitors to outrank us?
We know this layout makes sense from the perspective of a user, but we're unclear how to move forward from a search perspective.
Any tips?
-
Thanks, Jake!
-
My first thought would be to simply canonical the pages to the preferred version you would want a visitor to find in search results (I'm guessing the mini-site versions b/c of the UX benefit of someone searching a specific procedure/condition)..
This will tell Google that you know it is a copy, and indicate where all authority should be passed.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization is a great resource you should check out on the topic.
Cheers,
Jake Bohall
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
-
How bad is it to have duplicate content across http:// and https:// versions of the site?
A lot of pages on our website are currently indexed on both their http:// and https:// URLs. I realise that this is a duplicate content problem, but how major an issue is this in practice? Also, am I right in saying that the best solution would be to use rel canonical tags to highlight the https pages as the canonical versions?
Technical SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Issue with duplicate content
Hello guys, i have a question about duplicate content. Recently I noticed that MOZ's system reports a lot of duplicate content on one of my sites. I'm a little confused what i should do with that because this content is created automatically. All the duplicate content comes from subdomain of my site where we actually share cool images with people. This subdomain is actually pointing to our Tumblr blog where people re-blog our posts and images a lot. I'm really confused how all this duplicate content is created and what i should do to prevent it. Please tell me whether i need to "noindex", "nofollow" that subdomain or you can suggest something better to resolve that issue. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
Duplicate content issue
Moz crawl diagnostic tool is giving me a heap of duplicate content for each event on my website... http://www.ticketarena.co.uk/events/Mint-Festival-7/ http://www.ticketarena.co.uk/events/Mint-Festival-7/index.html Should i use a 301 redirect on the second link? i was unaware that this was classed as duplicate content. I thought it was just the way the CMS system was set up? Can anyone shed any light on this please. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Duplicate Content - Captcha on Contact Form
I am going to be working on a site where the contact form is being flagged as duplicate content the URL is the same apart from having: /contact/10119 contact/31010 ...at the end of it. The only difference in the content of the page that I can see is the Captcha numbers? Is there a way to overcome this to stop duplicate content? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Duplicate video content question
This is really two questions in one. 1. If we put a video on YouTube and on our site via Wistia, how would that affect our rankings/authority/credibility? Would we get punished for duplicate video content? 2. If we put a Wistia hosted video on our website twice, on two different pages, we would get hit for having duplicate content? Any other suggestions regarding hosting on Wistia and YouTube versus just Wistia for product videos would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick1 -
Duplicate Footer Content
A client I just took over is having some duplicate content issues. At the top of each page he has about 200 words of unique content. Below this is are three big tables of text that talks about his services, history, etc. This table is pulled into the middle of every page using php. So, he has the exact same three big table of text across every page. What should I do to eliminate the dup content. I thought about removing the script then just rewriting the table of text on every page... Is there a better solution? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BigStereo0 -
Duplicate content with same URL?
SEOmoz is saying that I have duplicate content on: http://www.XXXX.com/content.asp?ID=ID http://www.XXXX.com/CONTENT.ASP?ID=ID The only difference I see in the URL is that the "content.asp" is capitalized in the second URL. Should I be worried about this or is this an issue with the SEOmoz crawl? Thanks for any help. Mike
Technical SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
Canonical usage and duplicate content
Hi We have a lot of pages about areas like ie. "Mallorca" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca), with tabbed pages like "excursion" (domain.com/spain/Mallorca/excursions) and "car rental" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca/car-rental) etc. The text on ie the "car rental"-page is very similar on Mallorca and Rhodos, and seomoz marks these as duplicate content. This happens on "car rental", "map", "weather" etc. which not have a lot of text but images and google maps inserted. Could i use rel=nex/prev/canonical to gather the information from the tabbed pages? That could show google that the Rhodos-map page is related to Rhodos and not Mallorca. Is that all wrong or/and is there a better way to do this? Thanks, Alsvik
Technical SEO | | alsvik0