Duplicate content across different domains

[jayoliverwright]

Hi Guys,

Looking for some advice regarding duplicate content across different domains. I have reviewed some previous Q&A on this topic e.g. https://moz.com/community/q/two-different-domains-exact-same-content but just want to confirm if I'm missing anything.

Basically, we have a client which has 1 site (call this site A) which has solids rankings. They have decided to build a new site (site B), which contains 50% duplicate pages and content from site A. Our recommendation to them was to make the content on site B as unique as possible but they want to launch asap, so not enough time. They will eventually transfer over to unique content on the website but in the short-term, it will be duplicate content.

John Mueller from Google has said several times that there is no duplicate content penalty. So assuming this is correct site A should be fine, no ranking losses. Any disagree with this?

Assuming we don't want to leave this to chance or assume John Mueller is correct would the next best thing to do is setup rel canonical tags between site A and site B on the pages with duplicate content?

Then once we have unique content ready, execute that content on the site and remove the canonical tags.

Any suggestions or advice would be very much appreciated!

Cheers,

Chris

[ChrisAshton]

Given this situation, that's exactly what I'd be doing.

John's advice does appear to be true; you won't be penalised for duplicate content but your rankings won't be great either.

Theoretically, Google should have no issue determining the fact that site A was the original source of that content and so it should suffer no ranking change at all. Canonicalisation is the path I'd be taking to hedge bets there and mitigate risk as much as possible.

It's still not guaranteed to be safe (Google may choose to ignore canonicalisation) but it's about as close as you're going to get. Hopefully the client doesn't drag their feet and take 2 years to get that content production started