What's the best way to manage content that is shared on two sites and keep both sites in search results?

[BostonWright]

I manage two sites that share some content. Currently we do not use a cross-domain canonical URL and allow both sites to be fully indexed. For business reasons, we want both sites to appear in results and need both to accumulate PR and other SEO/Social metrics. How can I manage the threat of duplicate content and still make sure business needs are met?

[irvingw]

Paraphrase the articles on the highest traffic pages to your secondary site and/or tweak the keyword targets

[BostonWright]

Changing the articles or even page titles is not an option.

[MattBarker]

I'm no technical expert but it sounds like you're playing with fire. I've seen more than one site penalised for exactly this. If it looks like you're trying to rank the same piece of content twice, at least one of the URLs is at risk of filtering or a penalty.  Isn't this exactly what the cross-domain canonical was created for?

[irvingw]

You can append additional content to the bottom of the page on the more important site, or break up the article by adding content and or ads between the paragraphs (which will probably result in article fragmentation) but if you're not a news source it's not a big deal.

[BostonWright]

If I used the cross-domain canonical, would that mean that one site would stop appearing in search results?

[GeorgeAndrews]

Sounds like you don't need to manage the threat of duplicate content; you are producing the duplicate content yourself. You are instead wanting to minimize the effect duplicate content has from one site to the next. The only way I know of to get eliminate the risk of duplicate content penalties is to noindex, 301 redirect, or provide canonical URLs.

Since you want both sites to continue being indexed, you can either keep doing what you're doing (and hope you don't get hit) or use canonical URLs and pick which site is best for each page.

Hope this helps.

[GeorgeAndrews]

Try this post for more info:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

[irvingw]

LOL true.

With all due respect, 301, noindex or cross-canonicalizing is as much of a solution as saying delete your second site. My suggestion of breaking up the content or appending additional content will possibly help you avoid a dupe content filter being triggered.

Duplicate content is not a penalty, it's a filter so the worst that happens is the main site that was bringing you the majority of traffic gets filtered and loses rankings to the secondary site.

I think a good question to ask at this point would be for you to clarify your first sentence: "I manage two sites that share some content"  can you define what "some" means? are they main conversion pages or secondary blog posts, and what percentage of the site is dupe content?

BTW, hope you're not interlinking your two sites keep them as separate as possible.

[MattBarker]

Irving, I had a client who had been hit with a manual penalty for Doorway Pages. They weren't Doorway Pages, they were just pages on various domains (that he owned) with a lot of duplicate content on them. We got him reinstated when we implemented cross-domain canonicals and filed a re-inclusion request. Sounds similar to this case?

Just wondering if anyone had heard of sites being hit like that for dupe content?

[irvingw]

Sure, that is a solution, but then rankings for the additional dupe sites went away because you basically suggested to Google "this URL on this site should not rank, because it is a copy of this article on this site, so give that site credit not me"

I believe that Jon has not been hit yet and wants both sites to rank, but is unable to change the content on either site to be unique. Any additional code you can insert in between the articles to create less similarity between both pages should help lessen the chance of getting hit but not a guarantee.

[EGOL]

Changing the articles or even page titles is not an option.

That's too bad.  What Irving suggested has the potential for HUGE wins.

I'd find a way if that was my site.

[BostonWright]

Does a duplicate content penalty impact specific pages or entire sites? If I wanted to test using the cross-domain canonical on a certain section of my site, would the impact be visible? Or would I need to put cross-domain canonicals on everything appearing on both sites in order to see the results?