I have a client that wants to put up a micro-site. It's not really even a niche micro-site, it's his whole site less a category and a few other pages. He is a plastic surgeon that offers cosmetic surgery services for the Face, Breast, and Body at his private practice in City A. He has partnered with another surgeon in City B who's surgical services are limited to only the Face. City B is nearby, but not so close that they consider themselves competitors for Facial surgery. The doctors agreement is that my client will perform only Breast and Body surgery at the City B location. He can market himself in City B (which he currently is not doing on his main site) but only for Breast and Body procedures and is not to compete for Facial surgery. Therefore, he needs this second site to not include content about Facial surgery.
My concern is duplicate content. His request plan: the micro-site will be on different domain and C-block, the content, location keywords and meta data will be completely re-written and target City B. However, he wants to use the same theme of his main site - same source code, html/css, same top level navigation, same sub-navigation less the Face section, same images/graphics, same forms, etc.
Is it okay to have the same exact site build on a different domain with rewritten copy (less a few pages) to target the same base keywords with only a different location? The site is intended for a different user group in City B, but I'm concerned the search engines won't like this and trigger the filters.
I've read a bunch of duplicate content articles including this post panda by Dr. Pete. Great post, but doesn't really answer this particular issue of duplicating code for a related site.
Can anyone make a case for or against this?
Thanks in advance!
