2 sites in one niche?

[BobGW]

Hello,

Can you be penalized for having 2 ecommerce sites in the same niche? Is there a way to do it white-hat? Please explain.

[SoftzSolutions]

Of course not.  But here I am assuming that you are not copy-pasting the same information in two sites.

[DarinPirkey]

No penalty but you have to be careful with duplicate content.  The issue with this is going to be branding.  If you get a follower of Site A then they probably won't follow site B (it's possible but doubtful)  I create "competition sites" all the time to compete with me.  Unique content and making sure that you don't have the same product description for same products can be a hassle but well worth it.  Branding is big though.  Think about Chemistry.com and Match.com; both are owned by the same company (IAC)  I think it's a great strategy and has worked well for us.

[CMC-SD]

In my experience, no. We purchased another company in our niche and have maintained the website that came with the company. The product lines overlap almost completely, and both sites rank very well. We write unique content for each site and change the names of overlapping product lines. We're not taking any pains to be sneaky -- our corporate address appears on both sites, there's some interlinking, and they're on the same C-block. If Google wants to punish companies that do this, they haven't bothered creating an algorithm for it. I'm not sure they'd want to punish this, however.

[dawnieando]

Definitely not.  It's a great way to dominate SERPs in your niche.  We have a range of lead generation websites which we use in this way.  As long as the content is unique then there is great benefit.

[williammarlow]

The consensus seems to be that it is whitehat when the content on each website justifies having different websites, and it is blackhat when you go with duplicate content.  I will play the devil's advocate and say that this tactic typically makes me nervous because it is an option that seems to appeal to companies that don't want to invest in really outstanding content in the first place.  That doesn't apply to everyone (Match.com and Chemistry.com would be two good examples of doing it right), but I think it makes sense to really nail one website before launching a second, and then having a plan to really nail the second.

[DarinPirkey]

That's how we do it too Will.  We rank the first site and then add the second.  You'll learn a lot about the niche when you build out the first one.

You can also do it where you have a e-commerce site as your main site and a reviews/ratings of products for the other site.  You can have the product reviewed on the second site and pull that data to your site for additional reviews (not just reviews about your site but about your site's products)  Works well and you can generally rank the pages pretty fast.

[dawnieando]

Google will simply filter out duplicate content unless you do it really badly and then you would probably get a message in GWT saying that you had copied something.  If you have multiple sites in the same niche and are genuinely contributing original and valuable content then I don't see an issue.  If I'm not mistaken match.com and chemistry.com largely run dynamic content and do a good job of it too.  Dynamic content (which makes sense) is the easiest way to go with this in terms of building maintainable sites going forward.