Duplicate content - similar content in two cities but one country

Question

I am a nutritionist and would like to open a new practice in a new area but the same country.

I would like to launch a local website for this area (URL with area name and local prices and addresses) but use most of the content from my current site to avoid rewriting a whole new website. I understand this is not idea but the I have done this when I launched abroad. However, as the site had a different top level domain I was not concerned with duplicate content.

As this site will be in the same country, it will have the same top level domain and I am worried that Google may see this as duplicate content.

Would this be considered duplicate content? If so is there any way I can avoid this?

Answer 1

Set a preferred URL for your content using canonical URL

A canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the "canonical", or "preferred", version of a web page as part of search engine optimization.

What is rel=canonical and Why Should I Use It:

When you run a data driven site or have other reasons why a document might be duplicated it’s important to tell search engines which copy is the master copy, or in the jargon, the “canonical” copy. When a search engine indexes your pages it can tell when content has been duplicated. Without additional information, the search engine will decide which page best meets the needs of their customers. This might be fine, but there are many instances of search engines delivering old and outdated pages because they chose the wrong document as canonical.

It is very easy to tell search engines the canonical URL with meta data in the HEAD of your documents. Put the following HTML near the top of your HEAD element on every page that is not canonical:

Answer 2

Google does not take into account TLD, ccTLD, sTLD, or domain names when evaluating duplicate content. However, you may have gotten away with it in the past or at least somewhat. I would avoid duplicate content as much as possible.

From my understanding, while most sites just use rich snippets markup to denote locations, it is good practice to create sub-domains where there is a requirement to keep separate sites such as yours. I would avoid duplicating important content keeping it in the parent domain, and put the more site unique content on the sub-domains. Please remember that sub-domains are seen as separate sites from each other and from the parent domain. You can link between them to provide the full scope of information to your users. I assume that you are going to have to strike a balance where some content snippets are duplicated. In this case, just make sure the pages are unique enough to be seen as different by the search engines.

Answer 3

This is duplicate content. Duplicate content exists between two pages (whatever if they internal or external of the same website). That's why Google can penalize your both websites for this.

A good idea to avoid rewriting a new website should be to speak about your new practice in the same website (especially because keywords in URL are not so good for SEO as you probably think).

To avoid duplicate content, you have two options (one or the other):

1. delete your new website and speak about your new practice by the means of your old website
2. use rel="canonical" tag for URLs of your new website to specify content comes from your old website (more info here)

Answer 4

When you speak of duplicate content banning your site, take that with a grain of salt. Content is commonly found similar between two or more sites within the same niche. If you sell shoes, more than likely, everyone else that sells shoes in your industry has content similar as yours. The problem can be when the content is actually duplicated verbatim. A bit of paraphrasing will get you by safely.

It is also good practice for many businesses who are serious in their internet marketing to have a corporate website, subsidiary websites, and product landing pages. If you fear you may repeat yourself because you lack content, consider turning your second website into a landing page. Landing pages have an extremely high optimization power if done right. Try to keep the content in this landing page isolated from the main page. Then make several external links to this landing page from your main page.

OR

If you lack the knowledge to perform this safely, DO NOT delete the site or use canonicals and 301s redirects. You can still use both sites. Instead, stop spiders from crawling it through your robots.txt file by using Disallow: / or URL. And direct your traffic here only from your main site with calls to action and external links.

Answer 5

Yes it would be considered as duplicate content and i would suggest you to use unique article because google may catch you and penalize you for using copied content. least you should do is rewrite your content and check your content in copysacpe.