In John Mueller’s hangout on 09/10/2021, he explained that in competitive areas that have a lot of similar content, it’s important to figure out how to make your content more unique.
A webmaster, who works for a network of 20 orthopedic doctors throughout the U.S., is facing issues with repeated content across much of the same clientele.
John explained that unique content is important, first and foremost. In these kinds of ultra-competitive spaces, it’s even more important to figure out how you can create the unique value that will help give you the competitive edge you need to succeed on Google.
Don’t fall into the trap of creating the same location page for each location for each client. This is not a good idea.
And don’t just regurgitate the same thing that your competitors are doing either.
This conversation occurs at approximately the 50:02 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout 09/10/2021 Transcript
Webmaster 6 50:02
Just a quick question. I work for a network of 20 orthopedic doctors located throughout the United States. And they are all under the same umbrella and provide the same exact services. Aside from being located in different cities, and having different doctors, there are no differences in their practices. So would there be an issue if we use the same content when building their websites and only optimizing for the location?
So for example, we have multiple websites. And each website has an elbow surgery page. And it has the same content, exact same content except for like, instead of saying, elbow surgery in New York, it says elbow surgery, Houston, is there any issue with that?
Or should we do something or something more, a little more customization? Because we do the customization for the homepage, and for the About Us page, and for a lot of other pages. But like, since it’s so many other pages, so many specific services it’s money and time that is going towards the content.
John 51:18
Now, I think it’s something where you almost need to think about kind of the competitive area as well. And think about what people would be searching for. If people are searching for elbow surgery in general, and they want information, then maybe it would make more sense to have a general elbow surgery page and, on the bottom, have some kind of dynamic element that is like our office nearby you is this are kind of the different addresses listed there.
Whereas if people are searching for elbow surgery in New York, then maybe it does make sense to have a unique page for elbow surgery in New York. And it especially with regards to kind of the the more competitive markets and competitive kinds of content, I would really try to figure out a way to make sure that the content is actually unique.
And not just like taking blocks of text and shifting it around. But actually making sure that it is something that is unique in the sense that when our algorithms look at these different pages, that they don’t say, well, 90 percent of the page is the same.
Therefore, we will just index one of these pages. And then suddenly, your elbow surgery Florida page is the one that is indexed and ranking. And the New York page is seen as a duplicate of that.
Webmaster 6 52:37
And just to be a little more specific, there are different websites. So they’re not, they’re not housed within one website. So does that still apply to what you’re saying?
John 52:50
Yeah, yeah. Okay. I think that would still apply there. So that’s something where I think if you want to create separate pages for this, I will just make sure that they’re really unique, because it’s it’s something where you really want to make sure that Google’s algorithms don’t look at those pages and say, Oh, it’s pretty much the same thing as the other one that we’ve seen.
And we will just like dupe eliminate one of them and make it easier for you. Because our algorithms are kind of like saying, well, like we’ll save you the hassle of having to crawl all of these pages. We’ll just crawl one of them. But you probably want all of them crawled and indexed.
Webmaster 6 53:31
Okay. I appreciate your answer. And thank you.
