I have read through http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html and http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html but still dont know how it will effect my situation... I have a website that sells a DRTV product in the US. Lets say its gizmo.com. We now have a Canadian distributor that wants the same site (minus some features, etc below) on gizmo.ca The Canadian version wont have a blog, live customer support, and it will have a different contact page. The buy now links will go to a different gateway, etc but everything else (content wise) is the same. The same youtube video on the homepage, same text, same FAQ, etc. Will the US site be penalized for duplicate content? Or will the Canadian one be for scraping content? What can I do to ensure I don't lose my US position by doing this? Thanks
While penalization for duplicate content is becoming less severe this year, I would not risk if you get really serious clients. Spin your .US content deeply and put it on .CA. It will require lots of effort, but will bring lots of benefits in the future.
The main problem is not about duplicated contents but overall content quality between two websites, which is easily identical as exact similar. If you can spend budget to build two websites I think you should spend some little more budget hire some cheap writers here to spin the content making sure they are unique, thus remain the overall meaning as it were.
Thats right - just make the text on the two sites different from each other Make the .com and the .ca site seperate from each other and run them as two sites rather than one It's a little bit more work as you will have to update both sites with any relevant news and ensure it is worded differently but it sounds like your business is doing well so the extra effort should pay off