Duplicate site with same content

[CFCU]

Hi All,

I hope someone can assist, We have 2 brands that sell the exact same products.  We have a main and an off brand. We just redeveloped the main brands site and now have to do the off brand (was owned by another company and we acquired them, we then changed their products to match ours).

Am I able to pretty much clone the site and just change the branding and rel canonical each page to its original on the main brand?  Granted I will lose rankings but will it be something that will affect anything else?

I want to do this so it saves us time in updating products on both sites (and avoids errors in incorrect pricing).

Would appreciate some guidance with this one

Cheers

Dave

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Dave,

You are right to look at cross-domain canonical to resolve this. This is absolutely what it is intended for. Google gives you more guidance on how to ensure this is done correctly, here.

Will it affect anything else? Well, it shouldn't, but a little due diligence after the work has been completed will help confirm all is OK. An audit of the two sites will help you to see that everything is mapped correctly.

-Andy

[LoganRay]

Hi David,

You will lose indexation for the non-canonical URLs, so keep that in mind. If you don't get much organic traffic to the off-brand, than that's probably not a problem.

If that is the case though, I'm wondering why even build out a site for the off-brand?

[CFCU]

Thanks Gents,

Great answers - much appreciated