When does "similar" = "duplicate content" for Google?

[zwickes]

Hi,

We have an existing product line marketed through SoftwareShield.com. We are revising and re-branding a very similar product line for a specific vertical market niche and marketing it through another domain. The existing product and domain will of course remain. The existing site is large-ish (>1000 pages) the vast majority (>930 pages) is support documentation. So a total re-write for the new domain is a problem. What we want to do is simply "rebrand" the site for the new domain and post it.

The end result would then be two distinct sites with near identical offerings - both of which are perfectly legitimate and independant. The problem is, I am fairly sure Google will freak-out and penalize us for duplicate content if we dont make them "different enough".

Q1: What do we need to do to reduce the chances this will happen without re-writing the whole site?

Q2: How can I quantify the changes necessary to minimize any Google penalization for "duplicate content"?

TIA.

[doj464]

Q1: Working in a company where we have successfully created "competing" companies in the same niche, here is what I would suggest... The website copy and design should specifically be different.

Q2: For all support Documentation you should take those URL's and do a "noindex" in the robots.txt file for your new site.

Cheers,
David J

[itispals]

Hello zwickes,
The issue of duplicate content arises only when the pages are indexed. Using Robots.txt to prevent the files from indexing can solve your problem.
May be my approach to this could be like this, i would start a new domain, that would probably give importance to what "software copy protection tools" can do.Rather than projecting the License Manager/checkpoint license server/clientprotector, the site would be more context oriented, i.e instead of directly saying, "why choose software shield?", i would go about saying the benefits of using such a software and give the visitor the option to further probe about software shield. This way i believe you may not be duplicating the content and it would be similar content..
Thanks,

[nnacho]

There is no Google penalization for duplicate content.

What will happen is that one of the sites is going to have less relevance.

[Conficio]

Well, less relevance, no-index (the evil in Google) and exclusion in robots.txt is sure not the desired outcome.

Look at it from a user's standpoint. Does all that support documentation make sense if the product name is wrong and may be the version number, etc.? Either yes, then I question the wisdom of creating a new product. May be a pro version or a XYZ medical or some other add-on type product will do.

If the answer is No, the you need to rewrite the content critically. may be you can outsource it to a cheap source of writing, if you can give clear guidance what is relevant and what not. May be this is a chance to improve on the support documentation in the first place.

Another way to add information, would be to pull in relevant info on the pages, such as add a user driven tagging system, some content from an RSS feed (you news that is relevant), etc. You could also think of aggregating the content, for example instead of N pages to a particular support topic, make one page with N anchors to jump to and an index at the top. This could be done automatically if the content is well structured (like has div classes and or id's).

Just my five cents.

K<o>