Two Brands One Site (Duplicate Content Issues)
-
Say your client has a national product, that's known by different brand names in different parts of the country.
Unilever owns a mayonnaise sold East of the Rockies as "Hellmanns" and West of the Rockies as "Best Foods". It's marketed the same way, same slogan, graphics, etc... only the logo/brand is different.
The websites are near identical with different logos, especially the interior pages. The Hellmanns version of the site has earned slightly more domain authority. Here is an example recipe page for some "WALDORF SALAD WRAPS by Bobby Flay Recipe"
http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1
http://www.hellmanns.us/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1
Both recipie pages are identical except for one logo. Neither pages ranks very well, neither has earned any backlinks, etc... Oddly the bestfood version does rank better (even though everything is the same, same backlinks, and hellmanns.us having more authority).
If you were advising the client, what would you do. You would ideally like the Hellmann version to rank well for East Coast searches, and the Best Foods version for West Coast searches.
So do you:
- Keep both versions with duplicate content, and focus on earning location relevant links. I.E. Earn Yelp reviews from east coast users for Hellmanns and West Coast users for Best foods?
- Cross Domain Canonical to give more of the link juice to only one brand so that only one of the pages ranks well for non-branded keywords? (but both sites would still rank for their branded keyworkds).
- No Index one of the brands so that only one version gets in the index and ranks at all. The other brand wouldn't even rank for it's branded keywords.
Assume it's not practical to create unique content for each brand (the obvious answer).
Note: I don't work for Unilver, but I have a client in a similar position. I lean towards #2, but the social media firm on the account wants to do #1. (obviously some functionally based bias in both our opinions, but we both just want to do what will work best for client).
Any thoughts?
-
it is like selling ice to eskimos in terms of convincing the brand managers who are convienced that they have too much equity in their existing brands to dillute/consolidate
I understand your situation as I have been there myself on more then one occasion. Having worked with eskimos I have learned they like money, so perhaps speak to them in financial terms. I would request a meeting with those who have the authority and ability to make a change and share the following ideas:
-
combining the two brands into one would be a significant cost savings. Product labels, designs, two websites, all aspects of branding from commercials, ads, promotional material, etc. can be condensed into one yielding savings.
-
sales can be increased. Why does a mayo company maintain a website? They probably aren't selling their product online so they recognize supporting their customer based with recipes and other information is helpful. By combining their sites their rankings in SERPs should noticeably improve. Rather then having the #5 and #7 results perhaps they could be closer to #1.
-
as Sha suggested, they can wrap a promotion around the name change. Engage your customer base in a tweet-fest and otherwise ask them for input. Ask your customers to vote for their favorite brand name.
-
if they established a single brand name their advertising dollars should work more effectively. Creating a single commercial/ad that runs nationwide is going to be more effective then splitting the country up. From personal experience I had never heard of "Best Foods" until I moved to California. When I watch tv and see a "Best Foods" ad because I am seeing a West Coast feed, the "Best Foods" ad is wasted on me. With a single brand, it would be more effective.
Almost every piece of logic involved indicates a brand merger. The only legitimate concern is how to handle the transition, and that is a management/marketing decision. A label can be produced with both the Hellman's and Best Food's logo on it then after ?a year one logo can be dropped.
We live in a time where we have seen industry giants well known throughout the country fail and close their doors forever. In most cases, these companies developed a successful strategy but failed to adjust. New businesses who weren't held down by past thinking flew past the old companies. It's up to your client whether that analogy applies to their situation.
As an SEO, your role isn't to force them into making a change they don't want to make. Instead I would recommend educating the client on the benefits of making the change, and ensuring they are aware of the negative issues and costs of not following your advice. If the client understands and makes the decision, you've done your part and can move on to other tactics to improve their SEO.
-
-
While I like Ryan and Sha's approach, it is like selling ice to eskamo's in terms of convincing the brand managers who are convienced that they have too much equity in their existing brands to dillute/consolidate.
When a browser does a branded keyword search, the brand managers aren't going to want a "http://story_of_Best_Foods_and_Hellmanns.com" url to be the top hit. They are going to want the branded URL that already has mindshare with the consumer. And of course if you do a search on Hellmanns Recipeis and get a hit like "http://hellmanns.com/recipie/bobbyflay.html" it's going to have much higher click through than "http://mayonnaise.com/recipie/bobbyfly.html" would get. The branded keyword in the URL just imply's relavance.
-
Another company in a similar situation (and maybe this is the company in question) is Dreyer's/Edy's. In case it's not your company, you can look and see if you can gain any insights into how they do their social media. Their websites look to be identical in code, and I don't see any canonical tags. I haven't examined how they have done their social media, but it's a thought of another place to look.
Thanks for your great answers Ryan and Sha!
-
I would agree with Ryan's approach and take it a step further ... in this case the company is missing out by just trying to be different things to different people!
I see some great opportunities to create new content that can interest and engage people, not to mention help retain customers they are in danger of losing because of a simple geographic relocation.
Some suggestions:
- Tell the Story
Create a page that cleverly explains how your product came to have two identities. Did it assume another as part of some global mayonnaise espionage effort....? or was it the result of a company merger? Make it interesting. write it as an example for other companies, create a "dueling logos" video presentation ...the list goes on.
- Create answer pages designed to help out the people who are missing their favorite product because they don't know it is there.
-
The "can't find Hellmanns" page
-
The "where to buy bestfoods mayo" page etc
There are lots of ways you can turn the potential disadvantage into a marketing advantage and all the while creating new content which could provide good opportunities for links and traffic.
BTW - Great to hear that you are all working together to get the best result for your client.
-
I was born and raised in Florida where most people used Hellmann's mayo. When I moved to California I couldn't understand why no one carried Hellmenn's mayo, then I noticed the Best Food's product had the same logo. I read the container and it said "known as Hellmenn's east of the Rockies".
I would recommend the same idea for the site. Present one site which shows either a rotating logo or other means to inform visitors it is the identical site but known as Hellman's in half the country, and Best Foods in the other half. This would allow your client to consolidate their DA which would benefit overall ranking. Additionally it is easier and cheaper to maintain one website instead of several. I noticed there are 4 separate sites: bestfoods.us, bestfoods.com, hellmanns.us and hellmanns.com. All sites have the same IP.
The BestFoods site ranking better for the given search is not really odd. The Hellmann's site has a page ranked at #7 and #19 for the given term, so it's strength is divided in the results.
There are odd anomolies such as neither page has a page title other then the site name. Google decided to help the BestFoods page by giving it's page a title of "Waldorf Salad Wraps - Best Foods". The difference of a clear page title is definitely helpful in rankings. It's odd the identical page from the other site wasn't helped with a page title in a similar manner.
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
-
Shall we add engaging and useful FAQ content in all our pages or rather not because of duplication and reduction of unique content?
We are considering to add at the end of alll our 1500 product pages answers to the 9 most frequently asked questions. These questions and answers will be 90% identical for all our products and personalizing them more is not an option and not so necessary since most questions are related to the process of reserving the product. We are convinced this will increase engagement of users with the page, time on page and it will be genuinely useful for the visitor as most visitors will not visit the seperate FAQ page. Also it will add more related keywords/topics to the page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
On the downside it will reduce the percentage of unique content per page and adds duplication. Any thoughts about wether in terms of google rankings we should go ahead and benefits in form of engagement may outweight downside of duplication of content?0 -
Site architecture, inner link strategy and duplicate or thin content HELP :)
Ok, can I just say I love that Moz exists! I am still very new to this whole website stuff. I've had a site for about 2 years that I have re-designed several times. It has been published this entire time as I made changes but I am now ready to create amazing content for my niche. Trouble is my target audience is in a very focused niche and my site is really only about 1 topic - life insurance for military families. I'm a military spouse who happens to be an experience life insurance agent offering plans to active duty service members, their spouses as well as veterans and retirees. So really I have 3 niches within a niche. I'm REALLY struggling on how to set up my site architecture. My site is basically fresh so it's a good time to get it hammered down as best as possible with my limited knowledge. Might I also add this is a very competitive space. My competitors are big, established brands who offer life insurance along with unaffiliated, informational sites like military.com or the va benefits site. The people in my niche rarely actually search for life insurance because they think they are all set by the military. When they do search it's very short which is common as this niche lives in a world of acronyms. I'm going to have to get real creative to see if there are any long tail keywords I can use as supporting posts but I think my best route is to attempt to rank for the short one to three keyword phrases this niche looks for while searching. Given my expertise on the subject I am able to write long 1000-5000 content on the matter that will also point out some considerations my competitors dont really cover. My challenge is I cant see how this can be broken into sub topics without having thin supporting content. It's my understanding that I should create these in order to inner link and have a shot at ranking. In thinking about my topic I feel like the supporting posts can only be so long. Furthermore, my three niches within my small overall niche search for short but different keywords. Seems I am struggling to put it all into words. Let me stop here with a question - is it bad to have one category in a website? If not I feel like this would solve my dilemma in making a good site map and content plan. it is possible to split my main topic into 3 categories. I heard somewhere you shouldn't inner link posts from different categories. Problem is if I dont it's not ideal for the user experience as the topics really arent that different. Example a military member might be researching his/her own life insurance and be curious about his spouses coverage. In order to satisfy this user's experience and increase the time on my site I should link to where they can find more dept on their spouses coverage which would be in a different category. Is this still acceptable since it's really not a different subject?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | insuretheheroes.com0 -
Multiple brands issue
My client has his main brand on the domain name .com and then 3 brands that exist on .com/brandA , com/brandB and .com/brandC We created a lot of content for .com main brand and we noticed that brandB copied some of our content and put it on .com/brandB . How to deal with this? Canonical tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aliciaporrata10090 -
Can a website be punished by panda if content scrapers have duplicated content?
I've noticed recently that a number of content scrapers are linking to one of our websites and have the duplicate content on their web pages. Can content scrapers affect the original website's ranking? I'm concerned that having duplicated content, even if hosted by scrapers, could be a bad signal to Google. What are the best ways to prevent this happening? I'd really appreciate any help as I can't find the answer online!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Duplicate site (disaster recovery) being crawled and creating two indexed search results
I have a primary domain, toptable.co.uk, and a disaster recovery site for this primary domain named uk-www.gtm.opentable.com. In the event of a disaster, toptable.co.uk would get CNAMEd (DNS alias) to the .gtm site. Naturally the .gtm disaster recover domian is an exact match to the toptable.co.uk domain. Unfortunately, Google has crawled the uk-www.gtm.opentable site, and it's showing up in search results. In most cases the gtm urls don't get redirected to toptable they actually appear as an entirely separate domain to the user. The strong feeling is that this duplicate content is hurting toptable.co.uk, especially as .gtm.ot is part of the .opentable.com domain which has significant authority. So we need a way of stopping Google from crawling gtm. There seem to be two potential fixes. Which is best for this case? use the robots.txt to block Google from crawling the .gtm site 2) canonicalize the the gtm urls to toptable.co.uk In general Google seems to recommend a canonical change but in this special case it seems robot.txt change could be best. Thanks in advance to the SEOmoz community!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OpenTable0 -
Duplicate content issue for franchising business
Hi All We are in the process of adding a franchise model to our exisitng stand alone business and as part of the package given to the franchisee will be a website with conent identical to our existing website apart from some minor details such as contact and address details. This creates a huge duplicate content issue and even if we implement a cannonical approach to this will still be unfair to the franchisee in terms of their markeitng and own SEO efforts. The url for each franchise will be unique but the content will be the same to a large extend. The nature of the service we offer (professional qualificaitons) is such that the "products" can only be described in a certain way and it will be near on in impossible to have a unique set of "product" pages for each franchisee. I hope that some of you have come across a similar problem or that some of you have suggestions or ideas for us to get round this. Kind regards Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masterpete0 -
Wordpress Duplicate Content Due To Allocating Two Post Categories
It looks like google has done a pretty deep crawl of my site and is now showing around 40 duplicate content issues for posts that I have tagged in two seperate categories for example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/latest-news/live-music-boosts-australian-economy http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/live-music-boosts-australian-economy I use the all in one SEO pack and have checked the no index for categories, archive, and tag archive boxes so google shouldn't even crawl this content should it? . I guess the obvious answer is to only put each post in one category but I shouldn't have to should I? Some posts are relevant in more than once category.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
How should we handle syndicated content on a partner site?
Say we have a subdomain with resources (resources.site.com) and a partner site (partner.com) and have an agreement to share content (I know - this isn't ideal but it's what I've got to work with). Please comment on the following: the use of cross-domain canonicals on "shared" articles an intro and/or conclusion paragraph that is unique on the site that re-publishes that could say something like "our partner over at resources.site.com recently published the following report ... yada, yada....." other meta tags to let Google know that we are not scraping, e.g. author tags any other steps we can take to ensure neither site gets "dinged" by the search engines. Thanks a bunch in advance! AK26
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | akim260