Duplication issue?

[beakerbum]

I'm working on a site for an equipment vendor. They asked me about something one of their manufacturers is offering, which they called a 'micro-site' for their vendors. Rather than pointing people to the manufacturer's website, possibly opening the door to people going to a competitor through a dealer locator, what they are doing is offering code that can be placed in the website that will populate the customer's site with information (such as using a php echo command). That way all the information can be on my customer's site, with my customer's branding, etc, but the customer doesn't have to maintain the site when there are changes.

This is a great idea i thought at first. But then a little bell went off in my head: Duplication. Basically there's going to end up being probably 6-8 pages where the bulk of the code would be identical with content on 6-8 pages for every other dealer of this manufacturer's product that takes advantage of this feature.

A lot of the reason they are restructuring their website is they have virtually no search presence at this moment. I'm afraid that this duplication would end up hurting them so I'm wondering if i should steer them away from this feature and instead create unique product pages optimized for their particular market?

[incrediblehelp]

I don't know why duplication has got such a page name in the SEO biz. Remember the thing that the search engines only do when this happens is pick ONE version and not rank the rest. That is it, nothing more. Of course this can be a huge issue for some. Like in my case with my blog issues recently. Where they are picking up a dummy URL instead of the main one. Google = dumb.

Now when duplication happens between two different domains names I feel it is usually less harmful. Like I mentioned above one will rank while the other will not. Millions of scrapper websites exist and few out rank the original content.

So if you don't care much about your microsite rankings then you can duplicate if you like.

[beakerbum]

I'm not as concerned about ranking for these pages. If it's true that all that happens is that these might not be the ones that get ranked, i'm not worried about that at all. I guess I'd always understood it that duplication was a spam technique and thus had the potential of your site being penalized for that.