Multiple site design and duplicate content

[mattheaton]

My company has an established site with a thousands of pages of very unique, user generated content targetted at <a certain professional audience.> We are creating a second portal site branded for a different audience but will use a large portion of the content from the first site. This second site will have different branding and navigation which is much more appropriate to the other audience.

My question is what is the best approach to avoid duplicate content hell. Here are some options we have.

1. On the new site we link back to the content pages on the original site. Easiest to do but it doesn't really solve the main issue of branding the content differently.

2. We duplicate all the content on the second site but set the no-index meta tag so Google and other search engines won't index it. Correct me if I'm wrong but this should avoid duplicate content penalties.

3. We duplicate the content pages on the second site but try to dynamically make enough changes to them that they may not appear as dupes in Googles eyes. Sounds risky...

What's your opinions or other ideas?

[edited by: tedster at 3:38 am (utc) on Nov. 18, 2006]
[edit reason] remove specific details [/edit]

[tedster]

#2 is a sure thing.

[g1smd]

#2 is good for search engines and avoiding duplcation but of course this means that the other site never appears in the SERPs and so gets no search engine traffic.

Even if you could get both domains indexed and ranked, you would still have no control over which visitor clicks on which of one of your two results.

Rebranding the same content on two different sites is not a good idea. If the content is the same on both sites then the sites are NOT targeting each specific audience at all, are they?

I think you need to step back and reconsider what it is that you think that you are attempting to do. From here it makes no sense to do it that way at all.