Help - my boss wants me to duplicate websites for local SEO targeting

[platinumhouse]

my boss is insisting that I duplicate a site that is ranking well and then roll it out across the UK on new domain names beginning with targeted city names in the domain name.

I will then be going through each duplicate site changing the location keywords to the target city location Along with images etc.

what effect will this have? Do you have any advice on the best way to tackle this?

thanks

[benesmartin]

Hey there,

When you duplicate an existing website, Google will penalize you. When someone else would duplicate your website, Google will penalize them (in most of the cases).

The reason why the site in UK is ranking well doesn't need to be the content itself but rather their back link profile. What you can do instead of copying the entire site is to check their back links and try to replicate them. This is less risky and you still kind of "copying" their effort.

Cheers, Martin

[MiriamEllis]

Hi PlatinumHouse,

Yikes - you're right to be concerned about what your boss is suggesting. Some questions:

1. What's the business model? Does the company have multiple physical locations for which the boss wants you to build these other websites or is it just one physical location and these sites will target cities where there is no physical presence?

2. Does the business meet face-to-face with customers? If so, where? At the place of business (brick-and-mortar) or in a service area (like a plumber)?

3. What is the purpose of targeting these other cities? What is the company's presence there?

[platinumhouse]

Hi Miriam, yes we have physical locations in each of the areas that we want to target with brick and mortar premises. The purpose of this is to target more on a city level.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Platinum,

Thanks for the clarification. Okay, so if you've got multiple brick-and-mortar locations, the typical local marketing strategy would look like this:

1. One website with a page for each physical location, reached either via a main menu or via a store locator widget.

2. A unique set of citations for each of the physical locations.

Suggest to your boss that he think big, like Whole Foods or McDonalds, with a single website that builds the brand, while connecting local consumers with the appropriate location via a store locator widget. Everything that the brand does (earning media attention, links, etc.) goes toward building the overall authority of the website, benefiting all of its locations. There is no need to duplicate content because each store can have a single page with its own content (photos, reviews, special offers, staff interviews, local news/advice, etc.).

What your boss is suggesting you do, however, is to forego the idea of creating a powerful brand by attempting to take a shortcut. His shortcut of building duplicate websites will likely result in Google's duplicate content filter affecting the company's rankings, and will fail to achieve the visibility he is likely hoping for.

Even if he was prepared not to take a total shortcut and to build unique content on each microsite, the strategy wouldn't be one most Local SEO experts would advise, because it is simply a better use of resources to pour all efforts into a single website rather than trying to divide your resources up between 5, 10, 100 websites. Your boss is already sensing that it would be overwhelming to properly manage multiple websites, and so he's considering taking an unadvised shortcut by serving up duplicate content to his consumers and search engines. So, actually, I think he's already part of the way there to realizing something just doesn't add up in the multi-site approach; he can already see without being told that doing it authentically would be unmanageable, so if you're going to step up and tell him you're worried about his strategy, this would be something to keep in mind.

Depending on your role at the company, the best advice that could be given to this owner at this critical point of decision is to ask him how much faith he has in the brand. If he believes in it, he should build it to maximum strength via the real work of building a reputation for sterling service, both online and offline. There is no shortcut to doing this, but to say he's going to rely, instead, on a risky strategy that has been specifically targeted by Google as a no-no is like an admission that the boss doesn't believe in the brand and can only prop it up with funky techniques that will not pay off in the long run. You'd be doing him a massive favor by pointing this out to him, but whether he's open to hearing this is another question, right?