Duplicate content on charity website
-
Hi Mozers,
We are working on a website for a UK charity – they are a hospice and have two distinct brands, one for their adult services and another for their children’s services.
They currently have two different websites which have a large number of pages that contain identical text. We spoke with them and agreed that it would be better to combine the websites under one URL – that way a number of the duplicate pages could be reduced as they are relevant to both brands.
What seamed like a good idea initially is beginning to not look so good now. We had planned to use CSS to load different style sheets for each brand – depending on the referring URL (adult / Child) the page would display the appropriate branding. This will will work well up to a point.
What we can’t work out is how to style the page if it is the initial landing page – the brands are quite different and we need to get this right. It is not such an issue for the management type pages (board of trustees etc) as they govern both identities.
The issue is the donation, fundraising pages – they need to be found, and we are concerned that users will be confused if one of those pages is the initial landing page and they are served the wrong brand. We have thought of making one page the main page and using rel canonical on the other one, but that will affect its ability to be found in the search engines.
Really not sure what the best way to move forward would be, any suggestions / guidance would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Fraser
.
-
Hi Fraser
Thanks for the info! Without being too intimately involved, based upon this description - it sounds like keeping two separate sites would have been perfectly fine. It seems like there'd be least user confusion (and much easier maintenance for you) with two sites. As mentioned the duplicate content issue is more of a myth as far as causing penalties in this situation.
However with that said - this doesn't mean you wouldn't want to mitigate against keeping the sites as unique as possible. You'd want to customize the content as much as you could for each site. I'd imagine because they are so different in real life, this wouldn't be hard to do - unique text, photos, design, etc.
Also - from looking at the sitemap, I don't think every one of those pages would be "landing pages" for commercial search terms. That's really the only issue I'd worry about - if you did have duplicate pages that were competing with one another to rank for the same keyword - but it doesn't sound like that's the case here.
-
What CMS are you using?
If the pages are loading the style sheets globally, can you just use a class/id for the body of adult and child pages then use these classes for setting the different styles:
.child-template .container-div { }
.adult-template .container-div { }
Then you can have the layout/page structure under the one URL with different styles.
-
Hi Dan,
Each site has around 65 pages with around 55% being shared between the two sites (duplicates).
In the real world the services it is one governing charity with two distinct brands. They both operate out of the same location, but have separate parts of the building. They have different names, distinct branding and each entity has its own social media accounts.
They cater for two distinct user groups – they look after people that are terminally ill EV is the adult service and JG is the children’s service. This is why the branding is so different with EV having an adult theme and JG having a child friendly theme as it is not only catering to patents but also to siblings.
It was the quantity of duplicate pages that initially concerned us which is why we wanted to move to a one site option. I have uploaded the separate navigation structures to imager which hopefully will make things clearer.
Thanks again
Fraser
-
Few questions:
- How many pages are each site separately?
- How many pages of those are duplicates? (ie: looking for % of pages duplicate vs not)
- In the "real-world" how distinct are the two services? Different locations? Different names, logos, legal business entities?
- Do the two services serve two distinctly different customers? ie: would the same person ever be a customer of both places?
- What about other things like social media - different accounts for each one?
I should clarify too, that "duplicate content" as a penalty is a myth. The angle I would really approach this, would be from UX - what makes it easiest for users to find/understand/navigate the two services and not be confused? Some answers to the questions above would help!
-
I don't know if the brand differences need to be disparate, but one option would be to just have one page for both - not different versions, but just always one page. You could add content that makes clear the page refers to both brands, and even generate new, rich content for it - while, on donation forms and landing pages, having a step or form-field that allows the user to choose which they're interested in.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Using Product Page Content from an Offline Website
Hi all, We have two websites. One of the website's no longer sells product range A. However, on the second website, we would like to sell range A. We paid a copywriter to write some really good content for these ranges and we were wondering if we would get stung for duplicate content if we took these descriptions from website 1 and placed them on website 2. The products / descriptions are live anymore and haven't been for about 6 weeks. We're ranking for some great keywords at the moment and we don't want to spoil that. Thanks in advance! D
Technical SEO | | 10dales0 -
Do you think my client is being hit for duplicate content?
Wordpress website. The client's website is http://www.denenapoints.com/ The URL that we purchase so that we could setup the hosting account is http://houston-injury-lawyers.com, which shows 1 page indexed in Google when I search for site:http://houston-injury-lawyers.com On http://www.denenapoints.com/ there is <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://houston-injury-lawyers.com/"> But on http://houston-injury-lawyers.com it says the same thing, <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://houston-injury-lawyers.com/" /> Is this how it should be setup, assuming that we want everything to point to http://denenapoints.com/? Maybe we should do a 301 redirect to be 100% Sure? Hopefully I explained this well enough. Please let me know if anyone has any thoughts, thanks!
Technical SEO | | georgetsn0 -
Duplicate content and rel canonicals?
Hi. I have a question relating to 2 sites that I manage with regards to duplicate content. These are 2 separate companies but the content is off a data base from the one(in other words the same). In terms of the rel canonical, how would we do this so that google does not penalise either site but can also have the content to crawl for both or is this just a dream?
Technical SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Duplicate Content for Multiple Instances of the Same Product?
Hi again! We're set to launch a new inventory-based site for a chain of car dealers with various locations across the midwest. Here's our issue: The different branches have overlap in the products that they sell, and each branch is adamant that their inventory comes up uniquely in site search. We don't want the site to get penalized for duplicate content; however, we don't want to implement a link rel=canonical because each product should carry the same weight in search. We've talked about having a basic URL for these product descriptions, and each instance of the inventory would be canonicalized to this main product, but it doesn't really make sense for the site structure to do this. Do you have any tips on how to ensure that these products (same description, new product from manufacturer) won't be penalized as duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | newwhy0 -
Duplicate Page Content for sorted archives?
Experienced backend dev, but SEO newbie here 🙂 When SEOmoz crawls my site, I get notified of DPC errors on some list/archive sorted pages (appending ?sort=X to the url). The pages all have rel=canonical to the archive home. Some of the pages are shorter (have only one or two entries). Is there a way to resolve this error? Perhaps add rel=nofollow to the sorting menu? Or perhaps find a method that utilizes a non-link navigation method to sort / switch sorted pages? No issues with duplicate content are showing up on google webmaster tools. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | jwondrusch0 -
How do I deal with Duplicate content?
Hi, I'm trying SEOMOZ and its saying that i've got loads of duplicate content. We provide phone numbers for cities all over the world, so have pages like this... https://www.keshercommunications.com/Romaniavoipnumbers.html https://www.keshercommunications.com/Icelandvoipnumbers.html etc etc. One for every country. The question is, how do I create pages for each one without it showing up as duplicate content? Each page is generated by the server, but Its impossible to write unique text for each one. Also, the competition seem to have done the same but google is listing all their pages when you search for 'DID Numbers. Look for DIDWW or MyDivert.
Technical SEO | | DanFromUK0 -
Duplicate page content
hi I am getting an duplicate content error in SEOMoz on one of my websites it shows http://www.exampledomain.co.uk http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/ http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/index.html how can i fix this? thanks darren
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
How do I get rid of duplicate content
I have a site that is new but I managed to get it to page one. Now when I scan it on SEO Moz I see that I have duplicate content. Ex: www.mysite.com, www.mysite.com/index and www.mysite.com/ How do I fix this without jeopardizing my SERPS ranking? Any tips?
Technical SEO | | bronxpad0