Two divisions, same parent company, identical websites

[kc_sunshines]

A client of mine has intentionally built two websites with identical content; both companies sell the same product, one via an 80 year old local brand, well known. The other division is a national brand, new, and working to expand. The old and new divisions cannot be marketed as a single company for legal reasons. My life would be simple if the rules for distinguishing between nation's could apply, but I only have city X, and The U.S. I understand there is no penalty for duplicate content per se but I need to say to Google, "if searcher is in city X, serve content X. If not, serve content U.S. Both sites have atrocious DA and from what GA tells me, the National content appears to have never been served in a SERP in 3 years. I've been asked to improve visibility for both sites.

[kc_sunshines]

Hi, Katarina! Thanks for this very thorough response - I'm beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel. When you say stress the address via directories, you are referring to making sure my external listings and directories are current, consistent, correct, yes? Just confirming you are not recommending something internal to the site? We are writing out driving directions where possible, and using the google maps api to display the location.

Also, we won't have unique images for the products - I might be able to do something to edit them differently, but they are the same thing. Will naming them uniquely matter?

For the rest, we are writing, writing, writing! The client had no idea their former developer (yup, they paid someone to do this to them) had done a bad thing, and when I first read their GA and MOZ data (before we really dove into the content on each page and realized it had literally been pasted from one site to the other), I thought the data had to be wrong, ha!

We're pursuing the suggestion about unique content, and think we have a way way to enough of it to matter. Thanks for taking the time to answer. I will try to post some before and after scores when we are done.

[Katarina-Borovska]

Hi,

when you are saying 2 websites - are they completely different domains? In this case you need to rewrite the content. I cannot  see how just different images would tell Google there isnt another identical website or a website with 90% of duplicated content.

I would suggest the following:

1. Keep the product names the same (unless you are allowed to change them) but make sure your images and descriptions are different.

2. Add completely different testimonials, reviews and case studies

3. Add completely different About us/Meet the team pages

4. Differentiate as much of content as you can and add extra sections where unique content can be added.

5. Don't replicate your backlinking strategy

6. Based on the areas targeted, find out about how effective geo redirects would be

7. Stress the address/location targeted via content, directories, G Maps

Simply flood the websites with a lot of unique content, change or at least reword what can be reworded. Make % of the  duplicated content as minimal as you can.

I hope this helps. Challenging. Good luck!

Katarina

[kc_sunshines]

Thank you! When I add photos, should I name them with locations in mind? Or are you saying that by having different photos, the search engines will recognize different content?

Also - the employees and leadership are the same, even the external partners are the same. But I could be careful about how employee bios are added - so the content is not duplicate, but unique on each site, so that's a good resource for unique content, if I plan carefully and keep it in mind. Thank you!

Driving directions are written out on the local site (the national site is digital), but I am thinking I might be able to reference a location in the testimonial or home city of the person offering the testimonial.

[Roman-Delcarmen]

My friends this is a big challenge for you as MichaelAMG mentioned, if you do not care about the content of the sites both will hurt each other. So this are some tips for multi-location businesses do to help improve their location pages

1. Use testimonials
2. Write out driving directions
3. Create employee bios
4. Add photos

[kc_sunshines]

You feel my pain! LOL, thanks. We are trying to rewrite content now, but their product offering (how they name their products, describe them, etc). are IDENTICAL. The business partners they link to and how they describe those offers are IDENTICAL. The most I can hope for is to never mention the city of the parent organization on the national site, EVER and to mention it A LOT on the city based site. We are hoping a top level blog with posts containing lots of city based v. national based keywords will help some, too. Do you think if I pair weekly geo-sensitive blog posts with improved geo-sensitive page content, I will have a chance of defining separate content for "near me" geolocation purposes? We are working on robust on page content with the proper geolocation keyword references now.

[Tenlo]

That sounds rough.  What you will want to do is alter your content for your single city based website to reflect that you serve that city, then when Google is looking for a match for a person near that city, it should see that site as the best match do to the weight it puts on geolocation.  In the long run, you will want to re-write all of your content on one site so that your two sites will not be hurting each other or look like copy/paste spam sites.