Content and url duplication?

[xtopher66]

One of the campaign tools flags one of my clients sites as having lots of duplicates.

This is true in the sense the content is sort of boiler plate but with the different countries wording changed. The is same with the urls but they are different in the sense a couple of words have changed in the url`s.

So its not the case of a cms or server issue as this seomoz advises. It doesnt need 301`s!

Thing is in the niche, freight, transport operators, shipping, I can see many other sites doing the same thing and those sites have lots of similar pages ranking very well. In fact one site has over 300 keywords ranked on page 1-2, but it is a large site with an 12yo domain, which clearly helps.

Of course having every page content unique is important, however, i suppose it is better than copy n paste from other sites. So its unique in that sense. Im hoping to convince the site owner to change the content over time for every country. A long process.

My biggest problem for understanding duplication issues is that every tabloid or broadsheet media website would be canned from google as quite often they scrape Reuters or re-publish standard press releases on their sites as newsworthy content. So i have great doubt that there is a penalty for it. You only have to look and you can see media sites duplication everywhere, everyday, but they get ranked. I just think that google dont rank the worst cases of spammy duplication. They still index though I notice.

So considering the business niche has very much the same content layout replicated content, which rank well, is this duplicate flag such a great worry?

Many businesses sell the same service to many locations and its virtually impossible to re write the services in a dozen or so different ways.

[TommyTan]

Hi,

Do you have different sites targeting different countries? Or do you have a main site but with different folders or subdomain for different location?  If it is the former, you should purchase a new ccTLD that targets that country.  For example, if your site targets people in UK, you should buy a .uk domain.  If it is the latter, you should include rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag and use geotarget.  These two methods will help you avoid duplicate content issue.

I believe the bigger sites that you mentioned are doing this thus they are still safe from search engines and are ranking pretty high.

Google understands sometimes you just can't rewrite something and thus they offer the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag.  Check out the following article from Google Support http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077