Hi,
We are working with a company who isn't your typical business. They don't sell anything through their site and are basically a resource site. They have distributors throughout the world though. Each distributor, once they sign on they get a custom made site with cookie cutter content and matching designs.
Since the content is mostly the same across the sites, would you all use the canonical tag on the duplicated pages or would you require unique content for each site? Obviously the primary business made the initial content to SELL and it is very high quality. I fear if each distributor writes their own content for uniqueness the quality will suffer.
Before we made any major changes I wanted to see if I could get a second opinion. Unfortunately I can not share the URLs.
Thanks in advance! That depends on how they plan on driving traffic to each of the distributor websites? Would it be beneficial for each of them to get organic search traffic? We would definitely like the distributor sites to show up in the search engines and be able to rank for the product name + city/state keywords still, but don't want to cannibalize the main site either. It's a sticky wicket!! If you use a canonical tag on the distributors websites, they won't show up in the search engines as you are pretty much telling Google not to index them because they are duplicate.
If you want them to show, unique content is the key.
It's true that Google doesn't want to index duplicate content but they do sometimes. However, it's not a long term viable thing to do as it will get removed at some point, especially if they become popular.
If you want to rank each of the distributor sites, it's best to have the meta tag, content around the geographical area + keywords, claim the Google map for each locations and cross link to each other as a basic strategy.
I would also suggest adding them to the Google Webmaster tools to check if there are any problems with them, and tweak the settings for your location. Oh, and make sure you have the phone number and address on each page of the sites to help Google locate them and rank them higher for their geographical area.
It's a lot of work but there are no shortcut in SEO.
Good luck
Content is the king. Unique content is critical. Almost all search engines remove duplicate pages, at least in rank phase (maybe not in indexing phase). By the way, the duplication detection method is various, the most effective one is the way of signature of longest sentences, which means if several longest sentences in one page are exactly same with another ones in another page, then these 2 pages are viewed as duplication.
We are working with a company who isn't your typical business. They don't sell anything through their site and are basically a resource site. They have distributors throughout the world though. Each distributor, once they sign on they get a custom made site with cookie cutter content and matching designs.
Since the content is mostly the same across the sites, would you all use the canonical tag on the duplicated pages or would you require unique content for each site? Obviously the primary business made the initial content to SELL and it is very high quality. I fear if each distributor writes their own content for uniqueness the quality will suffer.
Before we made any major changes I wanted to see if I could get a second opinion. Unfortunately I can not share the URLs.
Thanks in advance! That depends on how they plan on driving traffic to each of the distributor websites? Would it be beneficial for each of them to get organic search traffic? We would definitely like the distributor sites to show up in the search engines and be able to rank for the product name + city/state keywords still, but don't want to cannibalize the main site either. It's a sticky wicket!! If you use a canonical tag on the distributors websites, they won't show up in the search engines as you are pretty much telling Google not to index them because they are duplicate.
If you want them to show, unique content is the key.
It's true that Google doesn't want to index duplicate content but they do sometimes. However, it's not a long term viable thing to do as it will get removed at some point, especially if they become popular.
If you want to rank each of the distributor sites, it's best to have the meta tag, content around the geographical area + keywords, claim the Google map for each locations and cross link to each other as a basic strategy.
I would also suggest adding them to the Google Webmaster tools to check if there are any problems with them, and tweak the settings for your location. Oh, and make sure you have the phone number and address on each page of the sites to help Google locate them and rank them higher for their geographical area.
It's a lot of work but there are no shortcut in SEO.
Good luck