How To Handle Duplicate Content Regarding A Corp With Multiple Sites and Locations?

[JChronicle]

I have a client that has 800 locations.  50 of them are mine.  The corporation has a standard website for their locations.  The only thing different is their location info on each page.  The majority of the content is the same for each website for each location.

What can be done to minimize the impact/penalty of having "duplicate or near duplicate" content on their sites?  Assuming corporate won't allow the pages to be altered.

[Personnel_Concept]

Well similar content does get penalty for sure. More than 40 to 50 % similar content similarity is even worse. Robots.txt file can be implemented to not allow Google to index it though Google will still crawl it.

Content has to be changed. Contact us, about us are same in man websites which seems to be ok with Google as it cant be avoided and Google understand that. But having home page and other important pages similar too is not good. Will be good to see what others have to say here.

[Marcus_Miller]

It is time to speak to the corporation and tell them to get some professional advice. If they have 800 sites that are all exactly the same then they are at best going to see most of them fail to get indexed and at worse could face some kind of penalty or de-listing across the entire network (are these sites linked together?).

What can you do?

Well, if it were me, I would want to do one of the following:

1. Substantially rewrite the content across all of the sites and noindex any pages that can't be rewritten
2. Not use these corporate sites and build my own. If we can't have it taken down, at least no index it.
3. No index the duplicate pages and build your own unique content on the site to attract traffic
4. Create one unique and global site that has all locations listed in a directory type affair - maybe even with their own portal or sub domain with a blog and location specific content.
5. Create unique social portals on facebook / google plus and try to make those the main target for search users

As ever, without a link I have to add the caveat that it's kind of tough to give specific and laser targeted advice for sites we have not seen but certainly, this is problematic and will undermine any kind of SEO efforts you may make on the sites.

In a nutshell - you need to resolve this, or give up on these sites as a way of generating search traffic.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[JChronicle]

Thank you for the info... Some of that is similar to what I was thinking. I feel that corporate is pretty stiff but I will have to try to make a case with them.

[JChronicle]

Thanks again and let me know if you have any other ideas... I will keep you posted on what happens...

[Marcus_Miller]

Cool, keep me posted.