About the Author
Corey is the owner and President/CEO of Voltage. He has spent 18 years working in strategic and leadership roles focused on growing national and local client brands with award-winning, ROI-generating digital strategies. He's a recent recipient of the KCDMA 2019 Marketer of the Year award.
Duplicate content can be detrimental to your site’s performance and your progress in reaching your goals. When search engines crawl multiple pages with the same content, they can struggle to determine which one to rank. And when search engines don’t know how to rank your page, your traffic and conversions will take a hit.
People commonly imagine thieves and spammers when thinking about duplicate content. But that’s not always the case. Enterprise-level sites can have content from hundreds of thousands of product, location, and service pages being copied and pasted externally on supplier, manufacturer, dealer, or affiliate sites. If you’ve pulled product descriptions off another site, chances are other sites did so as well.
While you may not be doing anything spammy, you still need a strategy to combat these issues. For smaller sites, that may mean rewriting content to make it unique, but for enterprise sites, it’s not that easy. The thought of having to update thousands of pages of content may make you feel like burning the whole thing down and starting over. Don’t! We can help you handle duplicate content at the enterprise level.
I published “How to Handle Duplicate Content at Enterprise Scale” for Search Engine Journal breaking down 7 specific ways you can handle duplicate content for your enterprise site. Check out a few of the tips below and read the full article on SEJ to learn more.
Create Guidelines for Content Use
If your content is being utilized by other sites that are featuring, selling, or licensing your products or services, it’s a great idea to maintain as much control as possible by creating guidelines for usage. These policies can help your site maintain rankings (and brand integrity) by setting rules for what and how content can be used.
From the article:
Doing everything to minimize content that you intended to be part of the parent brand’s unique content from being “borrowed” or used is important. That doesn’t mean others can’t use it, but be clear in what is free use, what requires attribution, and anything off-limits.
Evaluate Global Templates
The more global elements you have in your templates, the higher the value unique content holds. Take a look at how much of your site carries over from page to page – header, footer, prefooter navigation, subnavigation, et cetera – and then look at how it balances with the content that can only be found on an individual page. The goal is to make it easy for search engines to differentiate between pages.
This is important if you’re working toward a best practice of having no more than 20% plus or minus duplicate content per page.
Create Scalable Copy
Scaling copy can be resource-intensive, making it one of the more challenging duplicate content solutions. This means creating content that can effectively and efficiently scale for many similar types of pages while maintaining uniqueness for each page.
I worked with a restaurant chain that had about 100 locations nationwide and it took some time and effort, but we were able to get to a point where every restaurant’s page of the site was at least 80% unique content.
Read the full article and check out the rest of my SEO articles on searchenginejournal.com.