SEOs have been treating duplicate content like the plague, but it’s important to know not all duplicate content is treated equally. There are a variety of instances in which duplicate content comes about, and not all are as bad as you may think. In particular, occurrences of duplicate content for multi-unit businesses that have separate pages for each location. First off, if you have a page for each location, you are way ahead of the game. Don’t have the resources to write unique content for every single one? Stop stressing.
Let’s first distinguish between bad duplicate content and not so bad duplicate content. Bad duplicate content, the kind that sites receive penalties for, comes mainly from scraping it from other sources. In other words the duplicate version is on a different domain than the original, without giving any credit to the source. In other words, bad. Not as bad duplicate content would be having the same content two or more times on your own site. This is pretty common, especially with ecommerce where a product page may live in multiple categories, and therefore have multiple URLs for virtually the same page. I say this is not so bad because a site will not get penalized for such occurrences; however it’s not great either. Having duplicate pages without the proper safeguards in place (redirects or canonical tags) means not maximizing the site’s crawl potential, and can lead to the search engines not spidering the good pages while wasting time on duplicate pages.
There is a third type of duplicate content, bringing us back to local pages for multi-unit businesses. Sure, a franchise with 50 locations might be able to swing writing unique content for each of their locations, but think of the company’s that have thousands of locations to account for like Starbucks or Home Depot. Starbucks can probably afford to write unique content for every location, but is this really a good use of money and resources? When it comes to local pages, so long as the right local identifiers are in place, Google will not see these as duplicate content and omit them from the search results.
Let’s take Batteries Plus for example, a franchise company with approximately 600 locations, each with its own local page on batteriesplus.com. Not only are these local pages ranking for geo-modified brand searches, but are also coming up in top positions for search phrases such as “battery store denver.” In fact, in some cases multiple locations appear in the top organic results for these same non-branded searches, so clearly they are doing something right.
The main “about paragraph” on each of these pages is the same template with the one exception of some detailed landmark information in the first sentence. This is exactly the type of duplicate content I am referring to. The other areas of the page (address, phone number, store hours, etc.) are unique by nature, most likely populated by location information fields within the CMS, as opposed to hand written by a copywriter. Also notice that the title tag, headline and URL (naturally) are all local and unique, although still utilizing a template which dynamically inserts local fields. This is why the search engines keep these pages out of the “bad” and “not so bad” duplicate content buckets, because while they may have some similarities, they are in fact still unique.
Another interesting example that performs well in organic search is Grease Monkey. They utilize a combination of templates that rotate across their locations in conjunction with the unique local information (although are missing unique title tags).This case requires a little more development work and perhaps some small participation by franchisees, but creates more variation to the content.
While I have not seen Google come out and say that duplicate content on local pages is an accepted practice, experience, research and some rational thought lead me to believe that it is accepted and at least at this point in time will not put your site in danger of penalty. I caveat this with “at this point in time” because as we all know search engines make changes all the time and not always in ways that we agree with.