Two Sites with Similar Content

[MedGroupMedia]

I have a specialized website for hospitals covering a specific topic.  This same topic is also applicable to another market but with some minor modifications.  I'm thinking about starting a new site to target this specific market and use the same content as the one specialized for healthcare.  I will have to make some minor adjustments to the articles to take out the healthcare part and replace with the other industry.

If my content is similar between both sites and both authored by me could that possibly hurt my rankings?

Any opinions appreciated.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Dan,

Duplicate content can hurt your websites' ranking. My two cents in this regard would be to make the content on the other website unique no matter how closely related they both are. As you need both these sites to be able to rank high in search engines for their respective set of keywords/phrases, we cannot go in for "rel=canonical" implementation. Making minor changes to the content (with an intent to make the content on the new website unique) will not help to safely pass under Google's radar. So, please come up with substantially unique content for the new website.

Hope the following page from Google webmaster support will be of help to you in this case:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

[Modi]

See, as a user if you found duplicate content in 2 different sites - it probably will take your interest away from the second site. Google takes user behavior into consideration now by not giving priority to sites which has exact or almost similar content

If you want to build niche site by focusing on that geographical market - you should rewrite content which means value to the users of that territory. Even, if the interpretation is same as that on in original site, you should still add on certain points which are not covered in your first site

In terms of clear answer to your query from search engine perspective :-

"If my content is similar between both sites and both authored by me could that possibly hurt my rankings?"

Answer: Yes, as long as the content is similar across site, the search rankings will not gain or rather may be penalized too in long run.