Fix Duplicate Content Before Migration?

[futumara]

My client has 2 Wordpress sites (A and B).

Each site is 20 pages, with similar site structures, and 12 of the pages on A having nearly 100% duplicate content with their counterpart on B. I am not sure to what extent A and/or B is being penalized for this.

In 2 weeks (July 1) the client will execute a rebrand, renaming the business, launching C, and taking down A and B. Individual pages on A and B will be 301 redirected to their counterpart on C.

C will have a similar site structure to A and B. I expect the content will be freshened a bit, but may initially be very similar to the content on A and B.

I have 3 questions:

1. Given that only 2 weeks remain before the switchover - is there any purpose in resolving the duplicate content between A and B prior to taking them down?

2. Will 301 redirects from penalized pages on A or B actually hurt the ranking of the destination page on C?

3. If a page on C has the same content as its predecessor on A or B, could it be penalized for that, even though the page on A or B has since been taken down and replaced with a 301 redirect?

[ChrisAshton]

1. Definitely not.

2. Hard to say for sure but I really doubt it. You can't actually get penalised for duplicate content so if anything I'd say it's a positive signal that 2 duplicate sets have been consolidated.

3. No. Theoretically there may be a window there where the new site is crawled before Google has noticed that the old one is no longer live (rankings are done based on their cached version, not the live site so if they still have the old site in cache, to Google it's still considered live) but that's both temporary and unlikely to have any measurable impact.

I'm working through a similar situation for a client at the moment where I'm waiting on their dev team to finish up the new site and I have a bunch of rubbish pages I want to do away with. The most efficient way to deal with both situations given they're just a couple of weeks away is to wait for the new site.

Hope that helps!

[DickensLawGroup]

I've had similar questions regarding duplicate content. Thanks for the helpful answer and link!