If multiple franchise sites have the same content? Is this spam?

If the franchisor and franchises link to each other?

[stlouislouis]

Hi,

Lets say you have a franchisor parent and several legitimate
independently owned franchisee online stores spread around the
USA -- each having the same *high quality helpful type content
for their local customers* -- and selling the same offerings -- as the
other independent franchisee sites in other areas of the USA offer
for sale on their sites. Of course, the franchisor will link to their
franchisees in a "find a franchisee near you" section.

Is this spam to Google or other search engines?

The business model is one of several local companies
serving their local market -- independently owned and operated.
However, the franchisor gives them all a cookie cutter type
site having the same content as all the other franchisees.
All these sites are submitted to the search engines optimized for
"generic keywords" + "local geographic keywords".

If this would be considered spam, how best to structure things so
the search engines don't regard it as spam? Basically, you would
have many -- say 2000 -- independently owned and operated sites
each having the same content, but serving a different local market --
yet accepting orders from outside that market if the orders came.

What's the story for how search engines regard these types of franchise
businesses having a lot of duplicate content site to site?

The independent franchisee sites would not link to each other -- but
likely to the parent franchisor site, as would the parent franchisor site
link to it's many franchisees. Would this be OK? The parent would not
sell products -- it's a legitimate franchisor.

Each independent franchisee would have their own domain name
different from the franchisor parent; i.e. Harrys-widgets.com.

What structure and link setup would be OK?

If the above would not be acceptable to the search engines, would it
be acceptable if only the franchisor parent had the"high quality helpful
type content for local franchisee customers", and all the independent franchisees linked
to the parent site's content rather than carry duplicate content on their sites?

Thanks,

Louis

[Marcia]

Louis, I don't know how this relates to what you're referring to as "franchises" but there are long-established companies that do not sell directly to the public, they only sell through what they refer to as "authorized distributors" who pay them a lot of money to become distributors.

The sites have different domain names but all sell the same products, by name, and most of the links on the sites lead to a frameset that's a "catalog" page at what's a third-level domain of the actual company's site.

The dealer can have what they want in the top part of the frameset and the <noframes>, which pulls up catalog pages from the company's site. The frameset catalog pages are all PR0 regardless of the PR of the pages linking to them, and to be perfectly honest, there's nothing about them that warrants anything more.

Just thought I'd point that out, because there are differences even though on the surface it's not obvious without some digging.

[ciml]

> However, the franchisor gives them all a cookie cutter type
site having the same content as all the other franchisees.

Louis, I think you need to think how you'd feel about this if you ran a search engine. If it was mine I'd not want 2000 listings for the same page.

> ...would it be acceptable if only the franchisor parent had the "high quality helpful type content for local franchisee customers", and all the independent franchisees linked to the parent site's content rather than carry duplicate content on their sites

That sounds like a more robot frienldy approach. Marcia's example is interesting, because "...PR0 regardless of the PR of the pages linking to them..." sounds very much like a penalty.

[stlouislouis]

Thanks for the replies. I've been wondering how it works when you have several franchise type companies each of which would have the same content -- and each of which would want to be listed in the search engines under both the "generic" keywords for their industry or market and the specific geographical keywords for their local area.

I'm sure this issue comes up with all the franchise type companies in the USA. How do most deal with the issues involved as they relate to the search engines such that they both don't offend the SEs and assist their franchisees to rank competitively for their industry/market keywords?

The problem with having all the content at the franchisor/hub site is the web searchers would have to jump thru more hoops before they got to the individual franchisee site, lowering conversions perhaps -- and the "hub" wouldn't have the local flavor the individual sites would offer as an advantage.

I'm wondering how to have seperate sites for each independently owned and operated franchisee, rather than a "company page" or subdomain at the parent franchisor site, and not offend the search engines.

Thanks for sharing,

Louis