Duplicate Content on my sites unavoidable... options?

[MickD]

My question is about reducing duplicate content which I seem to be getting punished for my google, essentially I have 5 websites for 5 different yet complimentary/similar businesses, one of the sites is the parent company so effectively the top of the tree if that's how people view it (in an organisational structure).

We have duplicate content on pages such as about us, employee profiles, product information and more such as right now we're writing a blog a week and posting it to each of the 5 sites which would be fine, the content is relevant to them all BUT google see's this as duplicate content and its hurting our rankings...

Do I seriously need to create different versions of content on all these sites? what are the rules, is it only content blocks of a certain size I need to worry about or is it also the 2-3 line H tags and short 5-6 line employee profiles?

For the blog, I want to use the blog content to help with rankings and keywords so I believe I need to have the content local to each site and not just point the blogs on 4 of the sites to a single parent blog, I also don't want to take people away from the site they originally visited to read a blog.

What are my options here? Thanks all :)

Oh Last question, is there a tool that tells me what duplicate content is being picked up and I'm being punished for?

[John Mackmohan]

Hi Mick,

Basically you can use one tool which most of SEO using for finding the content duplication issues. ex - http://copyscape.com/

if you have content copy issue with your own five site so you can use canonical tag in your coding to saw your relation between urls.

[Google Expert Michael Wilson]

Show is a list of sites. 

Do not worry no one gets in trouble for showing there website. Actually it helps. 

That way we can properly look things over

Sent from my iPhone

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[Colin King]

Hi Michael,

 

We have just been through similar thought processes with our site at www.jigthings.com where we have the same products sold in both the USA and the UK.  We originally had two different sites but for SEO reasons we wanted to bring everything together in one site.  After a good deal of thought and debate   Here is what we eventually concluded...

 

Wherever possible we have made the UK page content as different as possible to its "twin" page in the US.  We have ensured that the titles and meta descriptions are different in each case.   We had about 25 "major" pages in each country each consisting of about 1,000 words so it was not an easy process but one we thought we must undertake.  As far as possible we ensured that the content was aimed specifically at the target country and gave credence to all the differences we knew about the requirements and the buying habits of that country.

 

Where it was not possible to write different content we used canonicals to make sure that only one of the pages was indexed - in our case we wanted the American site indexed because that is the most important to us.  Please note that as far as I am aware it is NOT possible to use canonicals across different sites - they can only be employed within the same domain.

 

Where we have very little content on a page (which doesn't happen very often with our particular site) we again used canonicals but I don't think this is critical because "light content" pages are not likely to accrue much PageRank in any case.  I'm on shaky ground here because it seldom happens that we have light content pages but perhaps someone else in the forum can shed some light on this.

 

Hope that helps,

 

Colin

 

 

 

[Google Expert Michael Wilson]

It's difficult to follow exactly what your trying to say, but let me tell you about my little buddy GoogleBot.... Having a site  with American section and a British section is very well fine. GoogleBot can see its different but very similar in was and a lot if information is the same and that's ok ..... But you must not have 2 sites running both American and British 

As long as you do all you can guys and gals to follow googles guidelines and real efforts for the visitors experience in the site... GoogleBot won't send a message to Penalize your site if it sees your doing your best but making unaware mistakes... It will penalize you if you try to pull a fast one on my little buddy. 

Let's talk about it some more later. 

Michael Wilson

Content is King

Sent from a Google Hub

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[Google Expert Michael Wilson]

In cases like that and 5 sites is not the answer..... Put info like employee info in a photo.. White background 

And yes if you feel you need 5 sites then 5 sets of writing. 

Michael

Sent from a Google Hub

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