Hypothetical SEO Question

[goldbergweismancairo]

I am running a website for a law firm. It has been running for many, many years and has plenty of backlinks and authority. I then create a standalone website for a specific type of case that the law firm is handling. On that website, I have a page that copies some of the attorney bio text from the main website.

How much of a negative impact will this standalone website have on the main website as far as duplicate content issues are concerned? Please explain your answer in detail. Thank you in advance.

[iQi]

Hi,

Duplicate content has always been bad. With all the recent Google updates, this has been enforced even more. So the impact is bad, I cant tell you how bad as this would depend on so many factors.

However, the solution or you is canonical tags, have you ever considered these to help robots identify primary pages?

Best of luck

[DougRoberts]

I first question that springs to my mind is why you want to create a separate site for a specific type of case?

Would it not be better to have this as a page/section on your current site? This would mean that this new content would benefit from the authority of your current site and you'll avoid the duplicate content problems as you can just refer to the canonical version.

What's the problem you're trying to address by creating the separate site? And what do you want that site to achieve?

If you go ahead, then Issa's suggestion of using a canonical tag tell Google that the bio page on the new site is a copy of the bio on the old site is a good one.

[MonicaOConnor]

There is no "penalty" per say for duplicate content. But, if you have the same page in two places they will be competing for a spot in the SERPs. The best way to handle that is a cross domain canonical tag.

I agree with Doug however. I think that there is more value having this information on your current site. Is there a particular reason you want them separate?