Two sites, two domains, two brands, 98% same content

[GOODSIR]

There are two affiliated brick & mortar retail stores moving into e-commerce. For non-marketing reasons separate e-commerce websites are desired.

The two brands are based in separate (nearby) cities in the same Canadian province.

Although the store name and branding will be different, the content on the site will either be near duplicates or exact duplicates.

The more I look into this on Google and SEOmoz QA, the more I am concerned about the SEO implications of this.

SEOmoz QA: Multiple cities/regions websites - duplicate content?

"So, yes, because you are offering the same services at second location, you are thinking correctly about the need to rewrite all content so it's not a duplicate of site #1."

Duplicate content - Webmaster Tools Help

"However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic… In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.

...

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results."

Unfortunately, I would say there's very little chance that rewritten content will happen in the foreseeable future.

With that said, I'd be greatly appreciative of the concerns and remedies that the SEOmoz community has to offer (even if they're for future use). Thanks in advance.

[MarieHaynes]

You won't be able to have both sites ranking in Google if you've got duplicate content.  One of them will be flagged with Panda and will plummet to page 10 or lower on the SERPS.

Now, if you don't necessarily need people to find one of these sites via Google, you can still have duplicate content.  It would be ideal to have the home pages be unique.  Then, for the inner pages, use a rel-canonical tag to tell Google which of the websites should be included in the index for these two duplicate pages.

The other option is to apply a noindex meta tag to the duplicated pages on one of the sites.  However, the canonical option is better.

[LukeHutchinson]

If you had a legitimate purpose you could try using encoding but I'm not sure how this falls within Googles guidelines you would need to check. From experience with similar issues I've found that anything up to about 60% duplicate will rank.