Consolidating a Large Site with Duplicate Content

[cassy_rich]

I will be restructuring a large website for an OEM. They provide products & services for multiple industries, and the product/service offering is identical across all industries.

I was looking at the site structure and ran a crawl test, and learned they have a LOT of duplicate content out there because of the way they set up their website.

They have a page in the navigation for “solution”, aka what industry you are in. Once that is selected, you are taken to a landing page, and from there, given many options to explore products, read blogs, learn about the business, and contact them. The main navigation is removed.

The URL structure is set up with folders, so no matter what you select after you go to your industry, the URL will be “domain.com/industry/next-page”.

The product offerings, blogs available, and contact us pages do not vary by industry, so the content that can be found on “domain.com/industry-1/product-1” is identical to the content found on “domain.com/industry-2/product-1” and so-on and so-forth.

This is a large site with a fair amount of traffic because it’s a pretty substantial OEM. Most of their content, however, is competing with itself because most of the pages on their website have duplicate content.

I won’t begin my work until I can dive in to their GA and have more in-depth conversations with them about what kind of activity they’re tracking and why they set up the website this way. However, I don’t know how strategic they were in this set up and I don’t think they were aware that they had duplicate content.

My first thought would be to work towards consolidating the way their site is set up, so we don’t spread the link-equity of “product-1” content, and direct all industries to one page, and track conversion paths a different way. However, I’ve never dealt with a site structure of this magnitude and don’t want to risk messing up their domain authority, missing redirect or URL mapping opportunities, or ruin the fact that their site is still performing well, even though multiple pages have the same content (most of which have high page authority and search visibility).

I was curious if anyone has dealt with this before and if they have any recommendations for tackling something like this?