I'm not super familiar with all the nitty-gritty SEO tactics and problems, so please bear with me. Canonicalization is something I just recently read about, I want to know if it will help.

 

A client of my company has a website about Gutter Guards, with SEO based around Kenosha, WI. He wants to create other sites, with SEO focused on other towns, such as Green Bay, Racine, etc. However, at the moment, he just wants to copy the original site design and content and then add in new keywords/towns for the SEO part.

 

I've heard of duplicate content and how that can negatively effect your ranking. This seems like a huge no-no when it comes to duplicate content...the same exact content located at 4 different urls.

 

So I read about using rel=canonical to tell the search engines that the content is actually a copy of another site. This sounds like a solution, but then I'm worried that the 3 news sites won't rank very well for the new keywords/towns.

 

I guess the questions are this: How much will having the same content on the pages but different meta data, page name, and urls hurt the ranking of all 4 sites? And if I use the rel=canonical solution to tell the search engines that the content is a copy of the original site, will the 3 news sites still get indexed and ranked for the new keywords/towns in the meta data?

 

I appreciate any help!

 

Steve

Duplicate content can affect your site because Google give penalty for duplicate content. So always try to do original and unique content and never copy any content from the other content.