Vendor created duplicate content on multiple client sites

[JrussellDAS]

I'm fairly new to a brick and mortar auto service and repair company with multiple brands and locations in a number of different states. I am not new to this scenario (auto repair, multi-brand/site). The vendor that hosts and created the websites at this current company used duplicate content on their client sites and set the pages to no index. So for example oil change, brakes, wheel alignment pages are set to not appear in search, which is a problem for ranking for those terms. I am in the process of writing new content for about 25 service topic pages to replace the current content and set the pages to index but it will take some time to roll out. The CEO wants to know why we don't just set the pages to index, as is. He feels some indexing is better than none. Normally, I will use "our" duplicate content on our local pages and sometimes across brands that we've created because we use a universal corporate footer that links all the sites to the corporate site, and so Google can see the connections between the brands and multiple sites. But... using vendor content that appears on Joe's garage and Bob's garage and all-the-garages goes beyond a duplicate content issue. I've checked the content in a plagiarism checker and the content appears on multiple auto repair sites. It is not best practices and to me falls under black hat tactics. How do I explain this to the CEO, or am I wrong, and is this an acceptable part of using duplicate content? I know the myth of duplicate content, but isn't this different?

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

Your client is most likely not going to get penalized for duplicate content, but very likely it isn't going to get indexed or ranked while showing on multiple other websites. If anything, it may help the competition because I've see where duplicate content that was on website "A" first and then shows up on websites B, C, D, and E can be flagged by Google with a cross-domain canonical reference to website "A".

The original author of the duplicated content actually did the right thing by flagging it as no-index, that is the proper thing to do when re-publishing what is often referred to as "syndicated content, but normally syndicated/duplicated content is not used for primary pages, instead it is typically used for blog posts as an example (but it has little value there either if it isn't going to get indexed).

You are 100% on the right track by rewriting the content!