Duplicate content, Original source?

[pauledwards]

Hi there, say i have two websites with identicle content.

website a had content on before website b - so will be seen as the original source?

If the content was intended for website b, would taking it off a then make the orinal source to google then go to website b?

I want website b to get the value of the content but it was put on website a first - would taking it off website a then give website b the full power of the content?

Any help of advice much  appreciated.

Kind Regards,

[StefanJDorresteijn]

Do you have full control over website a? Because you might want to 301 it then.

[pauledwards]

Yes but tghey are and have to be 2 seperate sites. B needs the content from A - i am going to write unique content to put on A later.

[StefanJDorresteijn]

Okay, I would do it like this:

1. Copy the content from site A to site B
2. 301 the pages from site A to site B
3. Post new content on site A

This will work, unless your content is on the front page of site A. That's all I could think of but I could of course be wrong. Any more experienced Mozzers that know more about this?

[pauledwards]

I cant re-direct im afraid to say.

[StoresDirect]

I'm fairly new to the SEO industry so I can't give you an authoritative answer, but I can share some of my experience which seems relevant to your situation.

We have multiple retail websites with varying degrees of overlap of products on sale. One of our oldest domains specialises in fireplaces, but a couple of years ago we set up a general home products site which has a fireplace section featuring the same products as the specialist fireplace site. We wrote unique descriptions for all the fireplaces on new site.

When the time came to re-build the specialist fireplace site we ended up using the same Magento back-end as for our more general site. For the last 18 months both sites have been showing the same content for fireplaces, but with some differences in the content hierarchy. Currently the general site has a slightly higher domain authority and more external links, while the fireplaces site has links from a slightly higher number of domains.

The fireplace site took a nosedive in rankings for a couple of weeks after the re-launch, then not only recovered but gradually achieved higher rankings than before. The general home product site has never ranked as successfully for fireplace keywords, even though it was the originator of the content.

The difference in domain age may have a little to do with the difference in rankings, but other factors are pretty equal. From our experience it seems that where two related sites are sharing content Google prefers to show content from the site most relevant to the search rather than the site which originated the content.

[pauledwards]

Thanks that is really interesting, well i intend to take the content off the original source and hope the other site that keeps it on will get the full value of it.

[StoresDirect]

You might find it helpful to use social media when you move the content. Apparently Google can't reliably identify content origins and takes into account social signals and links - some time spent on social bookmarking and posting links to site b on Twitter, Facebook, etc could help shift Google's attention to where you want it to go.

[Stamats]

Hello:  I believe what you might want to do is set up canonical content.  This is where you have the same article with two different urls.  The canonical content code will give Google the original source and not count it twice.