What is the Impact of Duplicate Content on Multiple Managed Property Domains?

[imiJoe]

Hi Moz Community!

Our team is having an internal (and external) debate regarding the extent and implications of duplicate content for a hospitality client that I would love to get some feedback on. I unfortunately cannot divulge the brand/URL, but will give as much info as possible.

The brand in question manages dozens of properties in the US and worldwide and has recently rolled up all of the domains under a singular brand.com domain. So whereas the properties used to have their own domains (property1.com, property2.com, etc...), they are now housed in sub-folders (brand.com/property1, brand.com/property2.com and so forth).

The concern we have is that they launched the new brand site with all of the property sites/content rolled up under the new brand.com domain, however all of the individual property sites and their pages are still live as well. All of the canonicals on both brand.com as well as property1.com (property2.com, property3.com, etc...) are self-referencing (so the canonicals for brand.com/property1 and all of its sub-ages do not point to the still live property1.com and all of its sub-pages, for example).

On the brand side, they believe this is the best path forward as brand.com grows and gains some authority, with the later intent on eventually redirecting the individual property domains - but we are unclear of that timeline (though we do think its more months as opposed to days/weeks)

So our questions for the community here are:

1. What is the perceived impact in this state of limbo to the individual property sites (ideally they house the original content and have the history, but could Google still give preference to the brand.com/property URLs and/or could both of them suffer in rank/search experience from the duplicate content an non-uniform presentation?)
2. Could brand.com be "dinged" so-to-speak due to launching with this much duplicate content? (And if so, could that affect how quickly normalization occurs after the property sites are finally redirected?)
3. Anything else we should consider/Any other feedback from the community?

Thank you all for your time and support!