When Google crawls 9,000 funeral home websites and finds the same page template on all of them, it has a problem: which one should it rank? The answer, in practice, is none of them. This is the structural SEO penalty that vendor platforms impose on every funeral home that uses them.
How Duplicate Content Works Against You
Google’s duplicate content algorithm is designed to surface the most authoritative, unique version of any given piece of content. When thousands of pages share the same boilerplate text — the same “About Us” language, the same service descriptions, the same homepage structure — Google consolidates them into a single canonical result and suppresses the rest.
Funeral homes sharing nearly identical page templates on major vendor platforms
Each one competing against the others for the same search rankings
The Three Types of Duplicate Content on Vendor Sites
Template duplication: The same HTML structure, CSS, and boilerplate text across all sites on the platform. Obituary page duplication: Obituary pages are generated from a database template — the structure is identical across every funeral home on the platform. Service page duplication: “Funeral Services” and “Cremation Services” pages on vendor templates often use near-identical copy with only the funeral home name swapped out.
The Fix
The only real fix for template-based duplicate content is to build on a custom foundation. Every page on your satellite property is written from scratch, structured uniquely, and optimized specifically for your market. Google sees it as a distinct, authoritative source — not a copy of 8,999 other pages.
Key Takeaway