Two sites with different URLs

[Winoman]

I help organize an ecommerce site for a company that is named after the state that the company was founded in (ex: Florida Pipes). Our programmer is thinking about creating a duplicate site that would have a name that was more location agnostic so people shopping on the site would not think that they may be ordering from far away hence incurring extra shipping charges. He said that the site would only have a different URLs, name and homepage but would link to all of the same stuff that is on the site that is up now. He said that there would be no way to tell (possibly for the layperson) that the two sites were related. Is this a good practice? Would we be penalized in search results for having two URLs linking to the same content? (We are a 30 year old company that ranks very high for our main keyword)

Thank you for your input!

[bstyle]

It is my opinion that no, this wouldn't really benefit you much. You could possibly have duplicate content issues, but you would most certainly have the problem of essentially doubling your SEO work. Having yourselves named after a state is not a huge deal. I worked for a company in a similar situation once and it didn't seem to hurt us much, it's really pretty common. Google provides ways of moving your URL if you wish to do that, but if it were me I'd steer clear of creating an entirely new website, unless you really just want to give your programmer a lot of work to do!

You might possibly setup a new ecommerce site and keep your old one as more of a corporate informational site. You would then want to do 301s (moved content) to the new site from your product pages. I am not fully sure of the ramifications of this (cross domain 301) though, someone else may want to comment on that.

[Winoman]

Good points. With the limited knowledge of SEO and ecommerce, I really do not think it's a good idea. I personally think that we just need to concentrate more on the site we do have and polish it up. Thank you for the response.