Will having duplicate content on four websites cause a problem?

[Rebecca.Holloway]

A client of ours has four websites for different shops they run in the surrounding area. Each website has original content as well as duplicate content. This is for things like product advice which needs to be the same

Will having duplicate content on these four websites cause a problem? How can it be mitigated? We can't refer the visitor to another website to get the product information as this will break the user experience, and of course shopping cart sessions will not pass on.

[GPainter]

use the canonical tag it will let you keep the pages where they are (as well as visitors) but tell Google which page is the original. As for harm it depends on how many pages I wouldn't see it being the greatest harm but its so easy to put the tag on you might as well do that. A quick heads up though by putting the tag on pages it means one page will rank but the others will no so be aware of that.

Hope that helps.

[Wasabihound]

Hi Tom

Short answer is that it probably won't be a problem. From what you are saying the duplication is 'natural' in the sense it is information which you might normally expect to see duplicated since it relates to similar products across multiple sites (also think privacy policy or terms and conditions pages).  In this case it is unlikely to attract a penalty.

Matt Cutts covered that topic in this video (posted on SearchEngineLand): Duplicate Content Won't Hurt You Unless its Spammy.

However, it will probably mean you are leaving it up to the search engine to decide which 'version' of your duplicate content it should prioritise and serve up to people searching. If it is not important to rank for the content on these duplicate pages then again it is not really an issue.

However if you want to play safe or aim to get some rankings for a specific page - among all the duplicate versions, you can use a rel=canonical tag to let the search engines know which page is the "original" so that they will prioritise this one (ie point the link juice at a specific page). Matt Cutts talks about that in this video (although he talks about it in the context of a news article).

Check out this Moz article on Duplicate Content - it also has a short explanation on how to use the rel=canonical.

All the best

Neil

[BruceA]

Hi Tom

It might also be worth checking if the clients e-commerce platforms will allow you to add tags into the head.  Some ERP website or cloud based sites don't so worth checking from the get go

Bruce

[DennisSeymour]

Hi Tom,

Are they on the same server and linking to each other? If so, then just canonical them. Im also assuming from what you said that it's just a few pages so it shouldn't be any problem. That, or just edit the pages a wee bit.

If they are on different servers and practically can't be traced to be related to each other, then I wouldn't even worry about it. Just being practical.