I have a client who has presented the following situation:
A parent company works with two distributors of their products. Both distributors want a new website developed. They both sell the same product, so will want to share content and basic page layouts. For example, product listings will be same across both sites, as will copy about the products they provide.
My concerns here are with SEO and duplicate content. Google defines duplicate content as:
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.
It seems that in this case, where two distributors are selling the same product, each having a website that duplicates content, is legitimate. But, I have a feeling either site could get penalised. So perhaps having two sites would be too damaging.
Any thoughts on this much appreciated.
Thanks
If it can't be helped, it's fine. Ideally you would want to make unique descriptions and content.
As recent as a couple months back, I had a staging site that didn't have the noindex tag on it by mistake. The staging site and the actual site were both ranking well for keywords.
While you are probably fine, you should still look into allotting time for content development.