Duplicate content can be a hindrance to SEO performance and can prevent your search strategy from reaching specific goals.
It also doesn’t help the searcher, which causes search engines like Google to identify other content as better answers.
Search engines can filter out pages from top search results and include pages that may not be the pages you need to rank prominently for your site.
Duplicate content doesn’t necessarily mean someone has stolen or copied your content without permission (though it does happen).
At the enterprise level, you may have resellers, affiliates, or others who use your content to sell your products.
Sites that belong to the same company model, or feature products or services from the same creator or manufacturer, may have exactly the same content as yours.
Even if you’re not doing any spam or malicious behavior, you need a strategy for dealing with duplicate content within your site and in relation to other sites.
With a business website, you can’t just update a page or two or write some custom tags to fix the problem.
Corporate websites with the complexity of potentially thousands of pages, products, services, locations, or regulated content face several challenges.
The good news is that there are specific ways to handle duplicate content enterprise-wide.
1. Content Usage Guidelines
If you own or create content and have others sell, display, or license your products or services, you need to exercise as much control over the use of your content as possible.
You may allow resellers, suppliers and affiliates to use descriptions and details to maintain brand integrity.
However, in order for your website to maintain the highest authority and ranking, you need to have policies on what content can and cannot be used. And, in some cases, you need rules or guidelines on attribution.
It is important to make every effort to reduce the “borrowing” or use of content that you intend to be part of your parent brand’s unique content.
That doesn’t mean other people can’t use it, but to be clear about what is free to use, what requires attribution, and anything that is prohibited.
2. Audit
Learn what content on your site is repeated between pages and elsewhere on the web.There are several great tools for detecting and reporting duplicate content in SEO tool suites and standalone tools, such as copywriting.
access to the regular processes and routines of internal on-site audits, and Web Moderation for Duplicate Content So you can find anything new.
This allows you to identify any use of unauthorized attempts to manage or navigate (per the points above).
3. Dynamic Variable Labels
Enterprise-level websites often have thousands of pages.
They are not suitable for manual title tags, meta descriptions and title tags. Even if they did, it would take considerable effort to write, monitor, and document tags to ensure they don’t contain duplicates.
Creating a dynamic set of tags is important for large e-commerce, lead generation, and branding sites with large sections and databases of products, blog posts, tech specs, and user-facing content.
In the past, this meant that SEOs worked with developers to write formulas for building tags based on database information. Most current sites have content management systems that allow tags to have dynamic variables and syntax.
Use dynamic tags as well as variables to your advantage to extend the content of tags and headers to ensure they are custom and as relevant and specific as possible to the content of the page.
4. Evaluate global template content
The more headers, footers, and other global page content (including navigation and sub-navigation on each page), the more unique body content you need.
This is important if you are working towards the best practice of no more than 20% positive and negative duplicate content per page.
This is especially important for pages that don’t have a lot of copy or are not long-form content pages.
The same copy of headers, text in links, and footers in each page or specific section or content type is forgotten.
If you don’t have to spell out every link on every page of the mega menu, don’t.
If you don’t have to have a ton of disclaimers on every page footer, don’t. Look for ways to minimize global content and know that if you have to have a lot of content, you need to have more body content to offset it.
5. Scalable copy
This is probably the most challenging enterprise duplicate content remediation or prevention method. Scaling a copy can be time-consuming and difficult.
Get stakeholders involved, if you can do it, I highly recommend it.
I worked with a restaurant chain that had about 100 locations across the country, it took some time and effort, but we were able to get to the point where at least 80% of each restaurant’s pages on the site were unique content.
In addition to this, we were able to expand the page into sections with unique content.
This was a game changer and helped us achieve top rankings for both local and traditional searches across markets. We can even compete with several restaurants in the same market, stacking the rankings on top and avoiding Google filtering.
If possible, work with content creators, franchisees, copywriters, UX designers and developers to creatively find ways to craft unique copy and content for each location.
In product and e-commerce – start with a category or product line to prove its worth.
As products become more specific and technical, use dynamic content blocks (similar to the aforementioned dynamic tags) to allow for more detailed copy per page.
6. User Generated Content
In addition to expanding content in internal sources, I also recommend finding ways to incorporate user-generated content.
This can include pull comment (if presented as content on a page), testimonials, FAQs, forums, and other content that helps offset duplicate content between pages, as well as provide new, unique copy about the subject matter of that particular page.
This creates an opportunity to scale with fewer internal resources, as long as it doesn’t require excessive moderation, legal scrutiny, and other gatekeeping steps that burden enterprise-level operations.
7. Canonical Labels
Sometimes a last resort, sometimes a first-line action, Canonical label This can be a great solution for corporate websites dealing with duplicate content.
However, they require a deeper understanding of their use and the risks associated with incorrect logic and implementation.
Canonical tags should be standard for any situation where pagination occurs (as opposed to lazy loading, AJAX and infinite scrolling cases – they can still include canonical usage and have their own risks in terms of indexing).
In any case where you intentionally include duplicate content on your site, use canonical tags to point to the pages you care about most for prominent rankings.
This is how you aggregate a page’s link value and visibility by understanding your duplicate content situation.
Significantly ranking a page with the wrong (which you don’t want) or no page is definitely an advantage.
When it comes to pages on other sites – you can also cross-domain link back to the original page to ensure proper credit and attribution is given.
Even if you can’t get an implementation of the spec, at least try to return the link to the source as attribution.
in conclusion
Content management and strategy on enterprise sites presents unique challenges in terms of the size, scale, and scope of the companies or entities involved that allow for the use of the same copy or have relationships that are not always manageable.
Using dynamic, technical, and copy-based scaling strategies, you can minimize the amount of duplicate content or manage it in a way that gives you control over the situation and pages that get value.
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