The topic of duplicate content has been a source of concern and confusion especially as it relates to multi-site website creation. For years, SEO professionals have warned about the dangers of having identical or similar content across different websites or pages. Is this concern justified, or is it merely a myth perpetuated by the industry? Let’s explore the reality of duplicate content and its impact on multi-site websites.
Understanding Duplicate Content
Before we get in the weeds, let’s clarify what we mean by duplicate content. According to Google, duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.
It’s important to note that duplicate content is not inherently negative. In fact, Matt Cutts, former head of Google’s spam team, once stated that “25 or 30% of all content on the web is duplicate content.” This statistic alone should indicate that duplicate content is a natural part of the web ecosystem. Our friends at Healthcare Marketing added
“Internal duplicate content is generally not a big deal, and Google understands that it’s unavoidable for certain types of sites, such as DSOs.”
The Reality for Local and Multi-Location Businesses
For Dental Service Organizations (DSO) and Management Service Organizations (MSO) operating different brands in nearby locations, it’s common and often necessary to have similar content across different domain names. Each location might need its own website with information about services, which naturally leads to some content overlap.
Google understands this reality, especially for local businesses. As long as each site provides value to its specific local audience and isn’t trying to manipulate search rankings, having some duplicate content across these sites is highly unlikely to cause issues.
The Myth of the Duplicate Content Penalty
One of the most persistent myths in SEO is the idea of a “duplicate content penalty.” Let’s be clear: there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty from Google. You will never receive a notification from Google Search Console stating that you’ve been penalized for duplicate content. (Source)
John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, has explicitly stated that duplicate content is not a negative ranking factor. Google’s algorithms are designed to handle duplicate content as a natural occurrence on the web. (I’ll admit, the cynic in me says “That’s what they want you to think…”)
As our friends at Practice Cafe point out:
“Google has been saying since at least 2008 that there is no ‘penalty’ for duplicate content.”
How Google Handles Duplicate Content
Rather than penalizing sites for duplicate content, Google’s approach is more nuanced:
- Content Consolidation: When Google finds multiple pages with the same or very similar content, it typically chooses one version to index and display in search results. This process is often referred to as “folding” similar pages together in the index.
- Selecting the Best Version: Google aims to index the highest quality and most relevant page among duplicates. This means that if you have valuable content that appears on multiple sites (such as location-based service pages), Google will try to show the most appropriate version to searchers.
- Avoiding Repetition in Search Results: Google’s goal is to provide diverse and useful results to users. By consolidating duplicate content, it prevents searchers from seeing the same information repeatedly in search results.
Deceptive and Non-Deceptive Duplicate Content
Our friends at Patient News point out that
“While there are no known Google penalties for duplicate content, there are other penalties that may occur like deceptive/misleading content or spamming.”
It’s crucial to distinguish between natural duplicate content and deceptive practices. Practice Cafe emphasizes this point:
“Google is actively working to show ‘less content that feels like it was made to attract clicks.'”
Google actively works to identify and potentially penalize “scaled content abuse” – the practice of creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users. The March 2024 Core Update specifically targets such content.
When Duplicate Content Might Be a Concern
While there’s no direct penalty for duplicate content, there are situations where it could potentially impact your SEO efforts. Our partners at Practice Cafe, Weo Media, Patient News, and Healthcare Marketing all agree there may be some downsides such as:
- Keyword Cannibalization: If you have multiple pages targeting the same keywords, they might compete with each other in search rankings. However, this is more of an issue with content strategy than a penalty.
- Diluted Link Equity: If external sites link to different versions of the same content, it could potentially dilute the SEO value of those links. However, with proper canonicalization, this issue can be mitigated.
- Crawl Budget: For very large sites, having a lot of duplicate content could theoretically impact how efficiently search engines crawl your site. However, for most websites, this is not a significant concern.
How to Address Content on Your Multi-site Website Infrastructure
The way Carenetic handles this problem on their multi-site website builds is by making the things unique to your brand that are actually unique in a scalable way.
For example, it is quite common to use the same description for services across your suite of brands. There’s not a ton of value in agonizing over different descriptions of how lasik is performed or how wisdom teeth are removed.
You can combat the bland, repeat information by including information on that page that is unique to the practice. This can include:
- Adding sections for “offices that perform this service”
- Adding sections for “doctors that perform this service”
- Using variables to swap out office name and location throughout the content.
- Unique photos and video assets
- Actual, relevant testimonials (video or written)
These items help personalize the page to each brand without requiring extensive content rewrites.
Of course, a marketing team can spend the time and expense making everything unique everywhere and that’s totally fine. A good multi-site infrastructure can handle the customization. In our experience, a lot of DSO and MSO groups aren’t prepared to handle that volume of custom content and so there’s a calculation on cost/benefit there.
We’d recommend you consult with your SEO partner on your website build to determine what the most important things are that you can do in your budget.
Conclusion
While the idea of a blanket “duplicate content penalty” is indeed a myth, it’s important to understand the nuances of how duplicate content can impact your SEO efforts. For DSO and MSO groups, the focus should be on providing the best possible information and experience for users in each location.
Remember, lack of a direct penalty doesn’t mean zero impact on rankings. Google rewards unique, valuable content. By balancing the need for consistent information across multiple sites with location-specific personalization and unique value additions, you can maintain strong SEO performance at the scale of a multi-site website network.
