How can a website have multiple pages of duplicate content - still rank?

[OhYeahSteve]

Can you have a website with multiple pages of the exact same copy, (being different locations of a franchise business), and still be able to rank for each individual franchise? Is that possible?

[max.favilli]

No it's not possible.

Let's say you have http://foo.com/a and http://bar.com/b and both have the exact same content, google will choose one, index it, and forget about the other.

Let's say you have 1000 pages on both foo.com and bar.com exactly the same 1000 pages, google will analyze each page one by one, and choose one version for the index, and forget about the other, depending on a variety of factors (like the domain itself and backlink profile) will pick some pages from foo.com and some from bar.com, but you will still have only 1000 pages in the index.

How much of the content of each page you need to change to differentiate is unknown since no one knows the code of google algo.

You can try with guess and test, you change something and you see what happen monitoring changes in the indexing of the edited pages.

[donford]

Hi Steve,

It is pretty well known duplicate content is not a "good thing" but it doesn't mean it will hurt you directly. Google rarely will penalize a site for duplicate content REF: Matt Cutts

It does however make ranking a specific page harder when you're competing with yourself. Most SEO tools will warn you about each case of duplicate content it finds which can also be annoying.

In the best case scenario you may rank multiple pages for longer tailed keywords for example.. something like

Main Keyword: Gourmet Shopping
Tails: Dayton Ohio, Tampa Florida, Los Angles California, Topeka Kansas

In such case you may would rank 1 of those pages over the other for Gourmet Shopping however if there was enough specific location specific content you may find other pages ranking well in those city state type searches.

Hope that makes sense,

Don

[hellemans]

If you have unique content on the actual franchise page (location etc.), the underlying pages could be duplicate content but use canonicals to point to the original content.

So you need at least one page per franchise to be unique (and use the proper markup if applicable).

Good luck

[MonicaOConnor]

Is it impossible to write unique content for these pages? Even a small amount of unique content on top of the exact same copy would be beneficial.