Using Product Page Content from an Offline Website

[10dales]

Hi all,

We have two websites. One of the website's no longer sells product range A.

However, on the second website, we would like to sell range A.

We paid a copywriter to write some really good content for these ranges and we were wondering if we would get stung for duplicate content if we took these descriptions from website 1 and placed them on website 2.

The products / descriptions are live anymore and haven't been for about 6 weeks.

We're ranking for some great keywords at the moment and we don't want to spoil that.

Thanks in advance!

D

[10dales]

Thanks for all your responses Linda and Dirk!

The pages are not live on the first website so there will be no possibility of any redirects.

Although i'm reassured now that we can transfer the descriptions over without being penalised.

Thank you again!

[Linda-Vassily]

Not at all, Dirk. I was just clarifying my answer.

If the pages still exist (just not listed on the website) and were doing well = Redirect or canonicalize to take advantage of their residual authority.

If the pages no longer exist = Not much you can do...

In either case, no problem with duplicate content as Google will soon figure out where the content now (exclusively) lives.

[DirkC]

Linda,

I hope there is no misunderstanding, I fully agreed with your first answer. I also like the solution with the canonical - however not possible to implement this if the content has already been put off-line.

rgds,

Dirk

[Linda-Vassily]

If you don't want to do the redirects, you can do the cross-domain canonical. Lots of unrelated sites do this, for instance when syndicating content.

[Linda-Vassily]

I saw that the writer had said that site 1 no longer sold product range A, but I wasn't sure whether that meant that the range pages had been removed from Google's index or whether they were just no longer available on the site.

I also wasn't sure which site was the one ranking for great keywords. If it is the product range A products on site 1 (with the really good content) then it might be best to leave them indexed, with the redirect, till Google picks up on the change and passes the goodness to site 2. (If not, no harm done.)

[10dales]

Thanks for your responses!

We don't want to do any redirects between the websites as we would like to keep them as two separate entities.

I believe google has the content still cached which is why i was panicking about duplicate content.

Thanks,

Dale

[DirkC]

Hi,

You can only have duplicate content if the same content is published on different sites. As far as I understand from your question, site one doesn't sell product range A anymore, so these products are no longer published on site one. So there can't be a duplicate content issue if you publish the same content on site two.

I like the suggestion of Linda to put 301 from the old pages on site 1 to the new pages on site 2 as it will reinforce the position of the new pages.

rgds,

Dirk

[Linda-Vassily]

You can use a cross-domain canonical from site 1 pointing to to site 2, or 301 redirect the pages from site 1 to site 2.

Duplicate content isn't a penalty, it just makes Google choose which version to show. If you use one of those signals (probably the 301, if you are sure this is a permanent change), the correct site will get the benefit of the content.