Hi, I have a question regarding the duplicate content filter. By way of example lets say I have a website about a certain breed of dog. The site is established and ranks first for the name of the breed. I decide I wish to set up a site with the same look and feel as the first one, but with a different breed. However certain information is going to be pertinant to both breeds, so in cretain articles on the site I change the name of the breed. Is this likely to affect the first site? At the moment I feel that it would not because: "other sites can not affect your site". The worst that could happen is that the second site will not rank highly for search terms. What do you guys think? Notting
If you have pages on both sites that are identical or nearly identical, one version can go in to the Supp results. It's generally the site with the lesser page strength. However, if major elements are changed such as the title with a different breed then followed by this keyword replaced throughout the document you "should" be ok. You should end up with both pages ranking for their particular breed. My suggestion is give it a go, it's highly unlikely you will harm site 1 by putting it in to Supps but monitor site 2's pages and if they go Supp you may need to alter a greater percentage of the text.
Depending on the length and quanity of the articles, you could always go in and make more changes other thn breed relatively quickly. My company uses templates for basic content whenever we get a new client. We ask the client to review the content and make minor changes throughout. When we get it back, we then make more minor changes to non-keyword content... replace "purchase" with "buy", "greatest" wth "best", etc. Like I said, it depends on your volume whether or not this is feasible, but it helps us keep off the duplicate content radar, even with 20+ new sites a month.
Agreed. If either of the sites will be damaged, chances are that it'll be the second one. The "older" site should be fine.
I don't see any problem with this. One should not affect the other because they are not really just duplicates. You should be fine and if you did good on the first, I am sure you can do the same for the second one. Good Luck
If you have more than 80% similar content it will get in the Supplemental pages .. but this is only per page, so you can get benefit if your main page is with unique content and the most important pages. You can still keep similar content on lower rated pages... see the new Google patent information on my link above for more information. Cheers, Venetsian.
If the information is relavent to the new breed you are writing about, I dont think it will be any problem. Aslong as the majority of the site isn't a clone
Actually, the misconception about supplementals and duplicate content has been around forever. Having pages with the same content on two different sites will NOT make one of the site go supp, that is flat out wrong. The main problem with duplicate contents is the "similar pages" filter. It has to do with a querystring parameter named "filter". At the end of many of the serps results, you will see a link that says: repeat the search with the omitted results included When you click on it, it repeats the search with "&filter=0" at the end of the querystring. For example, look at this search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...ice+about+refinancing,+it+is+a+must+for+them" 1 - 12 of 12 results. Now, view it again unfiltered: http://www.google.com/search?q="Som...ust+for+them"&num=100&hl=en&safe=off&filter=0 Notice closely, although every single one of those listings is an exact copy of my article, not one of them is supplemental. However, being buried is bad as well. Unfortunately for me, with that particular article I did not approach it like I should have, so the copy on my site is in fact one of the ones that is considered the duplicate, rather that the other way around. Those are for exact copies... if you have even a moderate amount of differences between the two you should be fine. If you would not expect both of the sites to come up for the same queries then you should be fine... in other words, if one is [greyhound training], and the other is [poodle training], then you should have nothing to worry about. However, I would not try the same tactic to get 2 sites to both rank for [dog training] (which it does not sound like you are attempting to do). Duplicate content is search term specific, supplemental results are not. -Michael
Thanks for your excellent responses people - all very helpful Cheers Notting Edit: Reps given, (You must spread some rep around before giving it to mvandemar again!)