Duplicate Content, Same Company?

[ColeLusby]

Hello Moz Community,

I am doing work for a company and they have multiple locations.

For example, examplenewyork.com, examplesanfrancisco.com, etc.

They also have the same content on certain pages within each website.

For example, examplenewyork.com/page-a    has the same content as examplesanfrancisco.com/page-a

Does this duplicate content negatively impact us? Or could we rank for each page within each location parameter (for example, people in new york search page-a would see our web page and people in san fran search page-a would see our web page)?

I hope this is clear.

Thanks,

Cole

[TomRayner]

Hi Cole

That kind of duplication will almost certainly negatively impact your ability to rank.

It's the kind of dupe content that Google hates - the kind that's deliberately manipulative and used by sites just trying to rank for as many different KWs or locations as possible, without trying to give people a unique user experience.

Not to say that you couldn't possibly rank like this (I've seen it happen and will probably see it again in the future), but you're leaving yourself wide open to a Panda penalty and, as such, I'd highly recommend that you cater each site and each landing page to your particular audience.  Even by doing that, not only will you be making it unique but you would dramatically improve your chances of ranking by mentioning local things for a local page.

Give each page unique copy and really tailor it to your local audience.

Hope this helps.

[ColeLusby]

Hey Tom,

The keywords we are competing for aren't very competitive.

Two follow up questions:

1.) To what length should we change the content? For example, is it a matter of a few words (location based) or is it more of altering each content on the page. I guess my question deals with the scope of the content change.

2.) Is there a way to let Google know we own all the websites? I had href lang in mind here. This may not be possible; I just wanted to ask.

Tom, thanks so much for your help.

Cole

[TomRayner]

Hey Cole

1. The more you do change, the less risk involved.  Some might tell you that if you change the content enough to pass "copyscape" or other online plagiarism tools, that would protect you from a penalty. I find that to be slightly ridiculous - why would Google judge by those external standards?  The more you can change, the better in my opinion (but I can totally sympathise with the work that entails)

2. Google will know you own the websites if you link them together, share GA code, host them together, contain the same company details and so on - but my question is why would you want to do that?  I think if you tried to tell Google you owned all the sites they would come out you even harder, as they could see it as you being manipulative.

To that point, others will recommend that you only use one domain and target different KWs or locations on different pages/subfolders/subdomains, as it'll look less like a link network. Downside of that is getting Google local listings for each page/location can be a bit of a pain if the pages all come from one domain.

It's not really my place to comment on your strategy and what you should/should not be doing, but suffice to say if you go with individual domains for each location, you should aim to make those domains (and their copy) as unique and independent as possible.

[Chris.Menke]

Cole,

I'm going to say roughly the same thing as the soon-to-be-guru Tom but give you somewhat of a different spin on it.

It's completely understandable that anyone with a website would feel that the the content applicable to one city would also apply to another city as well, so what's the harm in just switching out the city names? There shouldn't be really, and in most cases there is no actual harm, in it.

However, while Google's search engine makes it possible for customers in multiple cities to actually be able to seek out and find content you've "tailored" to them, it also makes it possible for other marketers to do the same as you've done--thus competition for keywords increases dramatically. On a small scale, google doesn't want to penalize, per se, a whole site for such practices, but it does want to differentiate that which might be original content from that which might be duplicates of the original and in doing so, be able to rank the original, while discounting duplicates.

To get around this "hurdle" you have to treat each of your pages as unique entities with unique values to each of your target markets.  That way, content for each page ends up being unique and Google's algorithm can prioritize all the competitors' pages uniformly according to how relevant and valuable they are to the target audience.

[TomRayner]

Chris makes a fantastic point here.

You almost need to detach "what's reasonable" from what Google wants sometimes.  Chris is right - why shouldn't those two pages have the same content? But we're dealing with algorithms mainly, not reasoning.

[Chris.Menke]

Sorry, I lost track of the fact that you were talking about dupe content on multiple domains, vs. on the same domain.  The same logic basically applies. However, when you're talking about essentially duplicating entire domains registered to the same owner, there can be somewhat more of a risk that the original content gets discounted (or in such cases, penalized) along with the duplicate.

If you have a main site that seems to be doing OK in the search results, you may consider keeping that domain and it's content, while eliminating/redirecting the other domains and revising their content for use on the domain you're keeping.

[ColeLusby]

Thanks all.