Duplicate content question

[TheZenAgency]

Hi

I have a site that is run off one CMS system but has 3 different web addresses. One is a comic shop, one is  a toy shop and one is a game shop. Now due to the nature of what we are selling some of the products we are selling on both or all 3 of the sites.

I was wondering as to whether this would affect my ability to rank in google and if i would be penalised for any duplicate content?

Thanks in advance

[LesleyPaone]

One trick you can do is dilute the text pretty easily and make some small changes to make them compete with each other instead of one canceling two out like a duplicate content will get you. You could try something like this and it should be pretty easy to implement if you are using a template based cart system.

Shop 1 - Just have the normal product description on the page and all of the standard text you have from your menu, ect basically changing nothing.

Shop 2 - If your site is utilizing rich snippets, change them on a template level. Most work like this $template_variable So on the second site delete a little bit of the rich snippet data, say the condition and the manufacturer name. At the same time on every product page add a 200-400 word shipping and return policy. As the current standards are, that should dilute everything enough to look like a totally different page.

Shop 3 - Basically the same as shop 2, change the rich snippet data that is sent a little. Maybe it could be adding manufacturer data that is not in the other templates, or taking something else that is non essential out of the template. Then add in on the product pages a different but meaning the same 100-200 word shipping policy. At the same time either add in an "about" section for the manufacturer, or if you have too many manufacturers for this to be reasonable add in an about for your company on every product page.

By doing this you will make the pages compete with each other instead of making one page dominate. If you are using a template based CMS, the changes should be easy and should only take about an hr or two to do, minus the time to write the content.

[kayintveen_MD]

Highland has a very good answer to this for sure. But i'd like to add something. We are magento specialists and work with a lot of multi-store environments, i'd say follow the following steps

• Best case: try to write unique copy per website with the same product and title. this would be fine, as long as the content is really unique on all 3 sites you have 3 ranking opportunities in stead of one.
• Else: If thats costs to much time or effort and does not give you enough ROI just choose highland's method of setting a canonical tag to you most powerful domain which is more likely to rank
• If thats to much time just forget it and let google fight it out, it wont give you much devaluation

[Highland]

It's not a penalty per se, it just means that Google is going to pick one copy and devalue the others. Does it affect your ability to rank? Not really. It just means one site is going to be the winner. Remember, a penalty is where Google devalues your whole site for bad behavior. Duplicate content is not bad behavior.

If you want to pick the rankings winner yourself you can add a canonical tag to the other pages pointing to the one you want to rank.