Domain w/ Identical Content to Site we are Optimizing

[Havas_Disco]

Hi Guys,

We've been optimizing a client's site for about a year or so now and on a call the other day the client brought up that he owns and operates another site that's marketing the same product, but to a difference audience (we work on the direct to consumer side, this is a distributior focused site),with the same exact content as the site we are optimizing.

Obviously this is a major duplcant content issue and we need to get it resolved very quickjly. We have already reccomendt to the client that we re-write content, but this is where my questions comes in -

Which site should we rewrite the content on?

The site we are optimizing is the more impoorant of the two, while we still want the other site to hold rankings we dont want to end up accidently optimizing the other site wherein the site we are working on full time suffers a lost when a "compeiting" site creates compeltely new content and may, accidentally, end up ranking higher than the site we are focusing on full time. As links also play a role, would that be a KPI to look at here in determining which site gets new content and which does not?

In this scenairo, would would you guys recommend? Just want to make sure I'm dotting all my I's, and crossing T's here.

Many thanks to all in advance,

Mike

[sesertin]

You're welcome Mike I'm glad to help. If you found it useful please mark it a good answer.

Cheers

[Havas_Disco]

Hey Zsolt,

Thanks for the positive bits of your response! Very much appreciate you taking the time to answer here.

Cheers,

Mike

[sesertin]

Hello Mike,

Fist of all you made a mistake when you began working with the site you did not investigate if the content is duplicate or not. However it is pointless to talk about that as you need to solve the situation.

Does the second site you are not working with get any links at all? How much pagerank has it got? How much traffic does it have? If number of links, pagerank and traffic are both low I think I would completely redirect the site, or rather use a canonical tag to the one you have been working with so far and simply start a brand new for distributors.

If distributors site has significant traffic and pagerank I would investiate which site ranks higher in the engines. If you have been doing your job well than no question that the consumer site will so you should rewrite the other one. If you rewrite you can try to kéép the most important points: number of words/keywords ratio, number of headings containing the keywords etc so you can try not to rewrite, but rather modify the text:

We are a hugh company with 20 years experience in our marketfield dealing with furniture.  modfified to Our campany was founded 20 years ago and since than we have continuasly been selling furniture.

So the imformation, the most important words and the plot remains the same but the text gets a brand new format.