Dividing a website into two websites

[Avinash_1234]

I have a website which talks about Yoga and GMAT classes (2,000 pages). It has blog posts, Faqs, discussions, videos etc.I am planning to fork GMAT content (1,000) pages into a niche website to rank better.

1. Is this a good idea or bad idea?

2. Will Google think niche new Yoga site as duplicate content was there on Dance site in the beginning.

3. I am doing this with assumption that niche website will have higher authority so that I can beat the competitors. What is the best approach to beat your competitors?

4. I am primarily concerned of what happens if I fork half of the website into a new one. Will Google treat new website as a duplicate content website because, this content WAS present in old website and Google will have archives of that. Please help

[ClaytonJ]

Generally a bad idea.

If the two websites are totally different then do it. If they can feed off each other - then one website. It is the equivalent of having two houses... two sets of rates, two sets of bills, and two gardens to clean up. One house is easier, but sometimes it is best to have another to put the inlaws in another house away from you.... it is your call, but if there is anyway you can put up with your inlaws then one site is teh way to go..

[ChrisAshton]

I completely agree with Clayton's response so I won't touch on that.

To answer your other question though of whether or not Google will see the second site as being duplicate, the short answer is that "it shouldn't".

Google will only reference the last-crawled copy of your website so the only time there could be potential for being seen as duplicate is if the new domain gets crawled before the old one is recrawled. Even then, I wouldn't expect it would have a measurable difference on the progress of a new domain.

Don't forget, you can't get penalized for duplicate content. The worst that can happen is your rankings slide somewhat but being a new domain, it'd take a few weeks/months to see any real rankings anyway so it's mostly a moot point