Duplicate Content - What are your experiences?

[tbp]

I have a site which is at number one in Google, in a format that works very well.

As a result I`m planning on buying other related domains for other keywords, and rewriting the content to target those keywords.

Now it can be hard enough to create an entire site around one product, but it works very well. It's even harder though to write the content a second time, even those it's targetted for different keywords, but it's the same basic info that needs to be displayed.

However, i`m worried about not changing it enough, and damaging the existing site with a duplicate content penalty (as google doesn't always slap down the right site!).

Obviously we all know that duplicate content is bad, but how similar does text have to be before its considered duplicate? I know theres no exact answer, but I`d be interested in hearing peoples experiences, as this is one of the only things I haven't had experience of before. I`ve always created sites on totally different areas, so it's one of the only things I haven't had to do before.

I`ve read a number of articles, but from my own experiences (which i`ve written about here), what SEO articles say and what the reality is can be two very different things!

I suppose what i`m really asking is how little have you changed, and still got a good result with no duplicate content issues?

Thanks!

[kylah16]

Have you tried Copyscape - Website Plagiarism Search - Web Site Content Copyright Protection? You put your url in and it shows you if there is anything similar to your page online so you can see if anyone is stealing your content. It's free as well.

[moredial]

I have 'quite a few' sites all covering the same niche. Some do better than others in the search results, some do better in one search engine than the others. They were basically my early experiments in SEOing for different search engines.

Pitfalls to avoid:

IF you have well SEOed content on one site, do not use the same content on another site. Even taking a few paragraphs of SEOed contend and then writing all the rest of the page with new content gets the page with shortest content penalised. You may already have seen this effect when someone has copied your content and then added a lot more of their content or other copied content to the same page.

Do not use the same TITLE and META content over the 2 sites.

Do not use the same text in menu links between the 2 sites.

Suggestions for success:

Aim at a different market segment. If you current site is written for the 10-year-old reading age, write your next site for the university-educated reading age. I was surprised recently when looking at the market segment that some ranking sites offer: a site which is written for college students has most visitors from males in the 55-65 age range.

If you aim for a different market segment you may find it easier to write that all important unique content while using a different vocabulary.

Look at your logs to see what search terms are used for the more marginal queries and use these phrases as the basis for your new content.

Do some brain storming - ask on forums in your niche and visitors to your current site what they would like you to add and build the new site around those areas.

Just look at the competition and make your second site better than theirs in terms of content.

As long as your new site adds to the overall content of the web, it will do well.

[gadget]

I'd also suggest you use a different hosting company. That way your IP addresses will be different.

[ian-d]

Yep, was just going to say, use a different hosting server, other than that, i think you are SEO clued up enough to avoid any damage to your main site.