Will multiple url's pointing to slightly different content rank poorly with search engines

Question

Background

We currently have a site that displays information about our products, the product is known by a different name and has different branding in different states within the same country. This product information is the same across each state, the branding (logos and names) are the only difference. Our current site has a single url and page for the product across all states. This is causing us to rank very low when it comes to searches on the state specific branding of our product.

We are planning to update our site to have urls that represent the branding for each state. Example 'product/brand-name-1', 'product/brand-name-2' and so on. The urls will point to a page that has almost the same content with only the product name (test) and the product logo (image) changing.

Question

Will having multiple url's pointing at content with only slight differences affect out search ranking?

What is the correct method to handle similar content with slight variants?

Research

I understand that Google and other search engines treat multiple url's to the same or similar content badly.

Answer 1

You are right. Duplicate or nearly duplicate content will cause problems.

The best thing to do, and I have seen this many times, is have a single website that is the parent company with products pages available. As well, have each brand name represented as being owned by the parent with a single page for each brand or all of the brands. You can have each brand site focus on the brand specifically then link to the products on the parent company site. If the products are the same, then they should all point to the same product pages. If any of the brand products are unique, then you can consider separate pages for that, though it sounds like this is not he case for you. It is a simple scheme.

I saw this twice recently while exploring commercial parts for the boiler in my apartment building. Each company owned several brands and each brand was represented with it's own site. However, when I clicked to see products, I was taken to the parent site products page with a different part-number for each brand if it applied. A B&G part could also be a Xylem part. Xylem owns B&G, though B&G is the manufacturer. Xylem actually does something else where there is overlap with several brands they own.