Need some expert help – My Client bought out competitor and now wants to completely duplicate the current site with the same stock & categories using the Competitor brand

[ryanlenton]

I am the SEO consultant for a large online homewares store. This company currently ranks very well in Google. I can PM the domain name if anyone needs however i don't want to post it on this forum.

The company has bought out a competitor and plan to use the same warehouse, same products, and same back-end system as the current site, so they want to completely duplicate the current website.

Titles, meta descriptions, product descriptions will all be renamed/rewritten/reworded (however keep in mind there are not many ways to reword a 3 piece saucepan set) Pricing will mostly be the same (some difference though), images cannot be renamed, categories cannot be renamed... the structure of the site will be exactly the same... placement etc. (however will have different banners, logo etc.)

I personally don't believe the new site will rank, because it will be too similar.

Can someone please offer me a 2nd opinion...

Thanks

[PaddyDisplays]

If you have it setup in WMT that the .CA site is for Canada and .com is for US, then it should be fine

[henya]

wondering along the same line-I have a client with a canadian site .ca who also owns the same domain but in .com and would like to duplicate the site for the .com US market.  There isnt much to change in terms of content is lights which tey get catalogues frm the manufacturer and she breaks her head to change the description to be unique so cant see her doing it a second time- pics are same.

Any ideas best way to go about this? I could just redirect the .com to .ca but think that defeats the purpose - idea is .ca gets canadian customers on google.ca and .com should rank high on google.com

[DennisSeymour]

It can actually rank. I've seen it work well but I would highly suggest the onpage content be changed, especially the product and category descriptions. If new, "unique" images can be produced, the better. Local search shouldn't be that big of a problem for this but internationally, I'm not so sure as I haven't done this scenario yet outside of local.

[MoosaHemani]

If the content (product description, other information, image alternate names and few others) are unique I believe there is still a chance but if your client wants to create an identical website to the competitor one with just a change in banner, I believe this is not really a good idea.

Also, if copying the competitor’s site will make a normal visitor think that 2 websites are more or less same then in that case it can affect the time on site and bounce rate which now have an impact on ranking

Hope this helps!