Duplicating an existing website - new name and reskin

[JustinTaylor88]

Would re-skinning, duplicating an exising ecommerce website with a new domain name cause any ranking issues?

The plan would be that all product data, pricing info etc would be identical, the site would have a minor redesign to change colours, logos etc and all duplicate content would be rel=canonicaled to the original site.

In case you are wondering the reason for this is a customer with an existing site wants to try out a new brand without incorporating a massive development costs.

The majority of traffic would be driving through google shopping, a bit of PPC, social etc.

Is this site duplication likely to harm the original site or will setting up rel=canonical to point to the original site going to be sufficient enough to prevent this happening?

Is there anything else is should consider?

Many thanks for your help

[MagicDude4Eva]

Is the intention to eventually get rid of the old domain/brand (provided that the new one is successful)?

Duplicating a domain would mean that you would pay extra for PPC (driving different brand terms) and would also mean that the reskinning would include some brand-term landing pages.

I don't think your new site will take off from an SEO perspective - especially considering that it will take about 4-8 weeks for the index to properly build out and you will only know about any duplicate content issues after it happened.

I think "trying out a new brand" is a bit dangerous, by just duplicating content on another domain and slapping a new skin on it. Unless of course the current domain does not have much SEO value with regards to branded keywords.

Depending on the number of products I think it would be better to pull up the new domain with a set of landing pages (preferably covering some of the most revenue-driving and least revenue-driving products) and a set of product pages with canonicals to the new domain and sitemap for the selected set of products and then setup PPC and funnels and do a side-by-side comparison.

If the new domain/SERPs/conversion performs better, 301 the old domain to the new one and move your products over. Anything else feels like being half-pregnant

[JustinTaylor88]

Hi Gerd

Thanks for the reply and suggestions.

My biggest concern is not with the new site, I am more concerned with the impact this might have on the existing site.

My logic being that if we rel=canonical any duplicate content to the existing site we would minimize or even eliminate any impact.

Justin

[MagicDude4Eva]

I suppose one easy way via robots.txt would be a NoIndex / Disallow across all content on the new site. And with this you would only measure new brand/page design.

If you are not really that interested about SERPs but the user traffic and the look and feel, why don't you try A/B testing?

I think running two different domains will not really validate much as you are not covering indexing (due to canonicals) and will probably only rank on the new domain/brand for your landing pages.