Creating 2 sites, same market, same design

[ariff44]

I am in the widget market and I have a few successful sites. Now I am consdering having 2 new sites designed for the main keyword in this industry. They will have the same layout but different colors and images. Keyword content will be slightly different. Titles will be slightly different. Both sites will be trying to hit the same market.

Now, in the normal business world, this would just be capturing the market, like owning walmart and kmart, however in the SEO world, this could be a problem, or so I hear.

My questions are as follows:

1. Will this be considered duplicate content?

2. How different does a site need to be from the other to avoid duplicate content?

3. If there is no way to avoid duplicate content, do I just create 1 site and foward both domains to 1?

Thanks for your help...

[Powdork]

when google considers "fresh content", is it only looking at body text or design code as welll (like if you redesigned your site)?

I think they are simply referring to whether your server sends the proper response code when Google sends the a conditional GET request using the if_modified_since header. [webmasterworld.com...]

Hope I said that right.

<added>200 would be the response for fresh content</added>

[ariff44]

powdork --

thanks for the info. the strategy I am considering is using different sites that are similiar but geared toward different markets and/or geared to customers in a different buying stage. I believe this is perfectly legitimate and as long as no crosslinking takes place, content is optimized for that market or buying stage and links are different, then Google probably does too.

[moose606]

I HAVE TWO SITES THAT SELL THE SAME PRODUCT LINES. THEY ARE SIMILAR IN LAYOUT BUT HAVE SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT CONTENT. ONE SITE IS MORE FOCUSED ON ONE PRODUCT LINE THAN THE OTHER SITE. THIS SITE GETS 70% OF THE TRAFFIC. I ALSO USE GOOGLE ADWORDS, OVERTURE, AND LOOKSMART ON THIS SITE. ITS NOT SPAM, IN MY OPINION, IT'S JUST GIVING CUSTOMERS MORE CHOICE.

[ncsuk]

"ITS NOT SPAM, IN MY OPINION, IT'S JUST GIVING CUSTOMERS MORE CHOICE."

Yes and no. In one way as long as the site that is more focused does not have anything the other site has then that would be okay but if you have the same content but changed slightly it could be considered a micro site which is very bad news no matter which way you look at it.

[webwoman]

The way my 2 sites work is this: We sell a telecom software product which is used by various markets - hotels, apartment complexes, corporations, law firms, etc. We sell 3 versions of this same product. One is for very small businesses and is real inexpensive. One is for medium sized businesses, and the main product is for huge corporations and is very high priced.

My main site is large and offers all three products and is optimized to reach all the publics. My 'second site' focuses only on the medium and small businesses. It links to the big site for anyone who mistakenly stumbles on it and actually needs the bigger product. Both sites rank well, the smaller one only for it's more focused 3,4 word phrases.

The main site ranks very well for the top 3 major keywords in its industry. These sites do run into each other in the serps at times, but mostly one or the other dominates for particular keywords. They aren't crosslinked since I only have the smaller site linking to the main site. It's a LOT OF WORK optimizing each site and building each with different content. And I can honestly say that after 6 months with the secondary site up, the leads have increased, but not to the level I expected when I came up with this 'bright idea' and not proportionate to the amount of work.

Sometimes I think I would have been better off to simply expand the original site.