Need Advice: Fintactix for Financial Brands. Good or Bad for SEO?

[Shelly]

I inherited a credit union client paying for Fintactix content and financial calculators (Fintactix | build smarter financial relationships). I was able to get tracking on the subdomain and very few people are visiting these pages (to be fair, we are not linking to it much but the main page is in our navigation and a link to the financial calculators is in the footer).

I am not sure if this is worth the time, effort, and money (note I do not know the cost but I'm guessing it is high) to upkeep it. Everything in my SEO head is saying all this duplicate content is bad but I can't find anyone complaining about the service online and it is very popular and seemingly rated very high. And, the content could be very helpful to our users if they could find it easier.

Here are my thoughts:
I know subdomains are not ideal but that is the only way to host the content
A plagiarism check showed 10 domains with the same content for one page I tested. Many banks and credit unions pay for this content
I DO have the ability to change the content, titles, meta, links, etc. if I want, but there are 100's of pages so there is a time investment to consider
There is a lot of great information for our members that would be extremely time-consuming to duplicate in our own words

I have been thinking for months and I am not sure if I should eliminate and start a strategy of our own authoritative content on our domain (knowing we can only do about 1 page per month) or keep it and try to update all the pages to be relevant even though it is on a subdomain.

I would love opinions on what others think in this situation.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

You may not want to link to your client's version, but could you link to one of the duplicate site's so that we can take a look at the pages?

Do any of the pages have incoming organic traffic, and if so do they make their way to the main site?

If you are tracking conversions, are these pages any where in that funnel? (if that can be tracked. I know it's difficult to track across subdomains.)

 

[Shelly]

Here is an example of one of the duplicate pages (not my client): Automating Your Finances

As of right now, there is very little organic traffic coming in, but I have also done very little internal linking or unique optimization to these pages because I am not sure if it is worth the time. I do have the ability to change as much as I would like on these articles (URLs, titles, content, internal links). I could also have the company add sidebar info blocks/promos back to my main site based on article category to help user flow (ie. on mortgage based articles link back to my core mortgage page).

I do have tracking on the subdomain. Because there is so little traffic, the articles that I added internal links to don't have more than 1-2 visits to even measure customer behavior.

I know with manual optimization time I could improve traffic and flow, I just am not sure if it is worth the time over creating much fewer original authoritative articles.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

Hmm, pretty generic stuff. Like you said, it's difficult to know without starting somewhere. As far as the duplicate issue, if there was a way to brand the content locally then the duplicate issue mostly disappears. But I would guess that people are not searching like that. If I were to start, I would do a quick update to the page titles to differentiate them from the rest of the duplicates out there.

 

[Shelly]

Thanks, @Yan Gilbert. I have actually changed titles on a handful of these articles as well as changed content and added links in some to see if it would make a difference. It has not, but I also have not added links TO these articles from our main site, just out of them back to the site.

I may play with them a bit more but I am leaning towards elimination.

If anyone else out there has specific experience with this particular content, I would love to hear more thoughts. It really comes down to how much effort to invest if I won't be able to move the needle. I don't think they are hurting, but I don't think they are helping either.