Creating smilar content with different design

is it allowed

[blue_eagle]

I wonder if we are allowed to create very smilar content with different design. Basically, I have some additions to my current sites but %85 of the content will be same with different design. I can't find any place in PP that mentions this.

Anyone has any idea?

Thanks

[diamondgrl]

You will, most likely, incur the duplicate content penalty by the search engines. Why not just change the original site?

[rapidcars]

I recently changed all my files to over.php instead of .html and I left the old .html files on the server so I didn't lose any search engine hits I might be getting from their listings. Am i better off deleting them now so I don't get the duplicate content penalty?

[diamondgrl]

rapidcars,

you definitely, definitely don't want to keep them around but you also shouldn't just eliminate them either. instead, look up how to do a 301 permanent redirect on the old pages to the new pages. that will give you the best results.

[rapidcars]

Thanks for the 301 suggestion. I figured out to do each page individually but the problem is I have hundreds of pages to do this for and it gets very tedious. Is there anyway to automatically change all .html to .php using 301?

[diamondgrl]

I believe you can do a mod_rewrite with Apache if that's what you are using. But I'm no expert on that so that's just a suggestion as to where you might look for more info.

[asinah]

You could use:

RewriteRule ^/olddir/(.*)\.php$ [yoursite.com...] [L,R=301]

This should work but I am not sure where your files are located. Do make sure you do that very very soon because you can be sure that u will get a duplicate content penalty from G

[cyberair]

I run a simple html side, and a template driven php side. They are both the same content under the same domain, but the .html is clean content only with little to no graphics for faster loading. Then the php has all the graphics. It hasn't had any duplicate content problem for over a year now.

[rapidcars]

Thanks asinah it worked perfectly:)