Using the same forum on two sites - Duplicate content worry?

[Gmorgan]

Hi all, hopefully some of you can help me out on this.

A client has a website where there is a popular forum serving a section of the market. The forum discussions easily lend themselves to another section of the market so the client wants to do use the exact same forum (with the same topics, replies, signatures, etc) and place it within another site.

Is there anything to consider when doing this?

Duplicate content would be an issue, though he will change the title tags slightly.

[tedster]

If you want both URL versions of the forum to get search traffic, yes - you do have a duplicate URL worry in that only one version will be ranked for any given query. It might even be a crap shoot as to which one, although the original version will probably have the edge.

For Google, you could use a canonical link tag that points to the other domain, so that way you suggest which domain gets into the index. However, at least for now, Google is the only search engine that supports cross-domain canonical tagging.