How best to avoid dup content pentalty

[customdy]

We have a site that sells blue widgets for ABC application. We would like to create a new site thats sells blue widets for XYZ application.

We planned to use very similar header and footers, not exact. We were planning on have some pages be almost identical, example would be our policy and shipping pages. Of course our product pages would be
similar but not exact.

Do you see any problems with this?

Thanks

[Brett_Tabke]

headers and footers don't matter - they are stripped by the indexer anyway - it is what is left after those templates are stripped on each site. The second site content will never rank well if you go with duplicate content. They should be atleast 12% apart.

[customdy]

Thank Brett, I think that we can make them atleast 12% diffent. We are selling the same product but different application so all of the text around the application will change accordingly. Is there a better way to accomplish this?

[pipster2004]

do ya know if the order of the information on tha page will sort this issue?

ie

site 1 ----

widget 1
widget 2
widget 3

site 2 ----

widget 3
widget 1
widget 2