Similar Sites with Similar Content

I have 2 sites and one sells items that are on the larger site with a similar look, pricing, copy, content etc. Can google or se's penalize me. Should I rewrite all copy? Any advice?

 

Beyond the SEO effect all websites should be unique in nature, being like everyone else isn't the key to success. You want to be different and stand out. Now, SEO wise "yes" you should have different content (however possible) and a different format all together. Use different filenames and alt attribute text for the images. Pricing is not an issue.

 

Rewrite is a must!

 

Same content? then you will defiantly meet with disaster. You should have unique content and try to include quality in your content. Only unique content is not enough.

 

if any two website have same content, one of them(which has crawled later) will get penalized.

 

I agree with Geeurbie to avoid being penalized by search engines.

 

Your rank in search engine will going down.
Be careful of the copied content.
But for design, I don't think so.

 

Your second site might get the penalty for duplicate content. Even if you continue with it, it will not rank high in google SERPs since everything in it is a copy of your original site. Remember that google is after the quality and uniqueness of content of a website.

 

My home page copy is completely different on the sites and the product copy is slightly different (descriptions, metas, etc.) Prices and SKU numbers are the same. How much more should I do specifically in regards to product copy?

 

Definitely re-write every page on the second so that they are unique -- i did the exact same thing i had two ecommerce sites selling the same products so i used the same product descriptions for both sites and they both never had good rankings... then i blocked the whole second site in the robots.txt file and gradually the rankings for the first site improved

 

how do you block file?

 

I was wondering the same thing - that is, will google penalize me. I have found out to my surprise that one of my competitors bluntly copy and pasted almost my whole FAQ and put in on their website. I am p*****

 

Send a blunt but professional response by email that they are infringing on your copy written material and request it be taken down. You should also mention that you will take legal action.

This is very common.

 

To block an entire website from the search engines enter the following information in a text file named robots.txt and upload the root directory of your website (i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt)

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

**Warning: this will cause all of the pages on the given website to be ignored by the search engines