A customer has a webshop in sports nutrition and supplements. For better SEO, we moved the webshop to a new webshop platform. Now he want to buy a better domain and he wants us to copy the content exactly to that website, only the url's will be different. Not all the product will come on that site. My advice is do not, but he gave me several examples of competitors who have done this successfully. It goes against my principles. Can we do this without being punished for one of the domains? Has anyone experience or advice?
Yes, It is possible and there is no need to worry about duplicate content if you are using Google webmaster tool where it is clearly mention on how to do Address change ( means change the url or if you are hosting on new domain).. Make sure you make a permanent redirect (301) from old url to new url.. For more information, search Google webmaster forum or visit thsi url -http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106 It may help you.
yes it will be duplicate but if you 301 redirect the old site or add cross domain cannonical tag to the old site you will be ok.
I couldn't have said it better myself. There's no reason to have 2 websites hosting the same content. Leaving one to rot means you'll end up with people ordering products that your client may no longer carry. A simple 301 redirect will send that sites current traffic to the new site where they'll be able to access everything as your client wants it to be seen.
Yes a 301 redirect is the best way - don't worry about duplicate content penalties for this - Google will just filter out any duplicate pages from a particular search query - it will probably choose to show the older page rather than the newer one in any search results
Duplicate arise only when a content is repeated on a single domain what you are referring to is syndicated content. Of course its not going to be of any harm to your site except the appraisal and SEO ranking will be accorded to the site that first published it.
if your client maintain both sites at the same time, then its duplicate content and the second website will get penalized sooner or later. just because the competitors have done it successfully doesnt mean you will get away with it too. follow the basic principle here. others didnt get penalized doesnt mean they will not in the future. if you however move the content over to the new domain and do a 301 redirect to the new domain from the old one, then its not duplicate content
There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you're scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines: source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html