Duplicate content across multiple e-commerce sites

[nks2012]

Hi,

This may have been discussed here before though I couldn't find a definitive answer, but I was wondering what the best practice for having multiple e-commerce sites with some of the same products on both is.

If Site A has 200 products, and Site B has 300 products, and 50 overlap, do they absolutely have to have unique product descriptions?  The descriptions have already been rewritten to be different from the manufacturer's description, but do they need to be changed again?

Or should the 50 products only be listed on one site or the other?

Sites like csnstores.com seem to have the same descriptions as the subsidiary sites that they have, but maybe they have different sidebars/footers/etc which make the content considered original?

[OptimizeSmart]

No they don't need to have absolutely unique product description. You can make your product pages unique through user generated contents (UGC) like comments, reviews etc. However in the end you must find a way to create uniqueness on your product pages.

[nks2012]

The thing is that comments and reviews take time to generate.  If I start these sites and there's a lot of duplicate content for the items listed on both sites for a while, will that cause both sites to be penalized?

[OptimizeSmart]

A site with a lower domain/page authority may get filtered out by Google. Why don't you use cross domain canonical tags if you can't fix the duplicate content issue at the moment. There is a good post on this topic on seomoz. You just need to search for it.