'Duplicate' eCommerce Content

[hedwig]

Hi All

I have a situation where two eCommerce sites will practically be the same, in terms of products and content, but have different branding.

Am aware that 'duplication' is, to an extent, somewhat a myth - But concerned about issues such as 'scraping'. Basically worrying that Google will read the text of these two domains and penalise.

Can anyone clarify or point me in the right direction for if there is a way of flagging this up to Google to say that these two websites are, in effect, using the same database and maintained by the same people - to avoid any negative impact?

Thanks!

[tedster]

If the content on two domains is essentially the same, then it is very unlikely that both domains can rank for any given query term - one will be filtered out. That is the risk involved, but it's not a true penalty.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Duplication isn't a myth. I have a newish price comparison engine that still has the stock product descriptions and it has over a hundred thousand pages indexed yet receives less than 10 visitors a day from search, lol. It will be months before I'd done replacing those and adding other features too... /cry.

[hedwig]

Thanks for the response - Sorry i was referring to a Google penalty for duplication [retail-ecommerce.com] being somewhat a myth, from how i understand it.

So is the general consensus that whilst neither site will get penalised and removed from rankings, Google will just focus on one of the two sites when returning results. Is there are way of controlling which one to have emphases on?

Thanks!