What is the best practice for using the same content on two pages?

[johnshearer]

I have two websites in a very similar niche(s)...I have good unique content article that I would like to use on both sites because it adds value to the visitor experience..

Example:

Science of Colors would be very useful for my seattle house painting paint colors page.

I want  to have content so they do not need to leave the site to navigate to second site. Would the identical content trigger a penalty or would it be crawled, ignored, and not indexed.

Does having a rel=authorship on one site trump the site..Or is it a pile of BAD.

[loopyal]

John,

Don't worry about google, write the story for your readers.

Target it to their needs, rewrite, paraphrase, add extra information for one group and different information for another group.

I'm not suggesting you only change a few words. I mean to really target the article for each group.

If you want to see how much google cares about duplicate content, try this search on google:

Romney wins Ohio, 4 other Super Tuesday states

Check those results and tell me that google cares about duplicate content.

If google really cared about having only one original story, none of those sites would get any search traffic.

You can see this for every single AP story, all day every day - those sites are paying a lot of money for AP content. If google was penalizing them for always having duplicate content, they would never show up in search results.

[johnshearer]

Alan, Thank you for your considered response.

If I only alter some text, and differentiated certain content like images and video do you believe that is enough to avoid a duplicate content potential P?

John

[loopyal]

I thnk you mean in the one you don't want to rank, the canonical tag should point to the one that you do want to rank. The canonical tag points to the original.

John, there is another option. You can edit one of the stories so that it directly addresses the visitors to that particular site. You may have a different headline, different description. There may be additional text. there may be text removed. Also, you can use a photo or a graphic or a video in this one, that isn't in the other. What this does is tailor the story for those readers.

[NakulGoyal]

Do you want both the pages to show up in the SERPS ? If yes, no, this would hurt you. The only way to do this if you only want to do it for the users / user experience is to have a canonical tag pointing to the one that you don't want to rank in the search engines.