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Best practice for franchise sites with duplicated content
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I know that duplicated content is a touchy subject but I work with multiple franchise groups and each franchisee wants their own site, however, almost all of the sites use the same content. I want to make sure that Google sees each one of these sites as unique sites and does not penalize them for the following issues.
All sites are hosted on the same server therefor the same IP address
All sites use generally the same content across their product pages (which are very very important pages) *templated content approved by corporate
Almost all sites have the same design (A few of the groups we work with have multiple design options)
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks Again
Aaron
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I fully agree. We have notified them all and let them know its in their best interest to modify the content throughout the site. Unfortunately most of them don't and the copy remains templated.
Thanks for your answers
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If the search is for Company product or service, You can take little advantage by doing local listing of each franchisee. Except This content rewriting is only option as per my knol.
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Maybe part of the literature describing your program can include the point that to be really effective the franchisee's will have to write their own content. It all depends on your business model, whether you want to make them aware that they have 100-5,000 competitors from your company alone.
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I fully agree with you EGOL "There is another problem - maybe bigger than Google's desire for unique content."
We give each franchisee the opportunity to expand on the content and make it their own, however I would say 90% of them don't make any changes.
I don't think that either the franchisee or corporate would want to pay the $$$ it would cost to have our Copywriters write unique copy for each site. (50-100+ products/services) per site or franchisee.
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I wish we could redo the strategy but we aren't talking about small franchises here. We are talking franchises anywhere from 100 stores all the way up to 5,000 stores.
The products/services they offer are described very well and unfortunately the only thing we add into each product page is maybe a few location identifiers and a company name.
I don't want to use the canonical solution because each site has to be seen as a stand along site.
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Each Franchise has their own domain.
Each Product/Service has a single description - Each franchisee has to use the same corporate approved logo.
All Images are named the same thing so it can matter.
I like your suggestions though...you are going the same route we have in the past.
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Information about Google using OCR... Use this link to see an example of how google extracted and highlighted "wrigley swim" from this newspaper scan.
Google can determine the color of an image... image files are actually characters and google can extract the colors. If you go into image search there is an option limit the results by color. Some of that is done via context (such as words in the file name or words near the image), however, some is done by extracting data from the image file.
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Here we are all giving advices based on their own knowledge. So i personally think Google cannot read images or what a specific image relates to. If I'm wrong and I hope I'm not ... can i get more details EGOL
Thanks.
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...Google cannot read images or colors...
Are you willing to bet a month's pay on that?
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I want to make sure that Google sees each one of these sites as unique sites...
I don't think that there is an inexpensive way to get this done and have high quality results. If you want unique content you gotta pay the price... but you could consider.
Hire several writers to reauthor the content - will cost a lot less than starting from scratch.
Get an article spinner program - that will be cheap but you will probably not like the results.
Make a enthusiastic sales pitch to each franchisee with incentives to write their own content.
...templated content approved by corporate...
There is another problem - maybe bigger than Google's desire for unique content.
Good luck.
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You may want to re-think your strategy of franchising the product and the content. If the content is the same the only way to eliminate the duplicate content problem is to point to one of them as the canonical version, and that would very much impact the performance of the other versions of the other sites.
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I suggest your give the products (franchise) use their own sort of domain(logo) but add franchise [your logo].
1. Their Own Domain
2. Their own product description even if it's the same product (maybe add your logo to make sure people recognizes the brand.
3. Design does not matter (urls, title, description, content etc counts) as Google cannot read images or colors
Hope it helps.
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