Duplicate content penalty if I copy from another of my own sites?

[mikem1986]

Hi guys

I own 2 websites, for 1 i don't rank very highly and for the other i'm 2nd and 3rd for my 2 main keywords respectively.

Weird thing is for the highly ranked one i haven't updated in about 18 months and is mainly text based and for the one i dont rank anywhere in, I update constantly but is more 50/50 graphics and text.

Thinking today I was going to change the look of the latter website and make it more text friendly and just copy and paste the info from the first site.

Both are registered with analytics and webmaster tools under my one account name. Im assuming Google would notice this but would i still be penalised for duplicate content even though the content im copying is mine originally anyway?

Thanks

[tedster]

There is no duplicate content "penalty" to worry about in a situation like this. One URL will be filtered out of the results for a given search, and a link will appear at the end-of-results page to repeat the search without the filter.

See Duplicate Content demystified [webmasterworld.com] for more.

[anallawalla]

There can be mysterious exceptions to the rule. I know of two banks in the top end of the UK that have different names but are owned by the same holding company. Same images, same design but different colours, same text other than the name of the banks and addresses. Both show up fairly close on page 1 for their terms. But I wouldn't recommend this.

[tedster]

Interesting! Sounds like strong "brand value" can get around the duplicate filter at times. in fact, now that you mention this, I think I've seen some examples of this, too.

[mikem1986]

So you think it would b worth doing then and there would be no major consequences?

[tedster]

exactly - except I should have asked, how much info will you be copying?

[seoN00B]

i been doing some copy and paste before for my news blog. i dont really have issues on duplicate content. and it ranked #1 on the main keywords till now. :)

[mikem1986]

Apologies for the late reply, it will be around 20 pages worth, estimate around 10,000 words

[tedster]

That's a pretty low level - if you feel the impulse to do it, I'd go ahead and see what the results are. Should be pretty harmless, at any rate.

[mikem1986]

I do have a backup, so can always put it back up if anything untoward happens