Multiple domain names with similar content

[Essentia]

Hi, we've got multiple domains that point to the same website and same content. The only difference is the currency and some text, you could say only about 5% difference in each domain's content:

http://www.redwrappings.com.au/
http://www.redwrappings.com/

Will Google penalise us for having 95% similar content for each domain (they sell the same products but in different currencies)?

We shoudn't really put canonical link, should we? Because 5% of the content is different, which means they are not identical. What would be the best solution if this is a problem?

Thanks

[Essentia]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for that. We do want to boost the rank on one domain compared to other domains, so i think this is the way to go.

Cheers

[calin_daniel]

Hi Graham,

In my experience cannonical content issues can arise with content that is only 50% similar. The strange thing is that in other cases I've had content that is 99.9% similar that hasn't been flagged by search engines.

There is a trick for identifiying the possiblity for duplicate content issues. It's outlined in this video series.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9AfEfTFgzM&feature=player_embedded

There are three parts to the video, and I must admit it is quite cheesy but the information is solid.

[Hondaspeder]

I don't believe it's a penalty, but seems a lot of people have this same question. Google:  "There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that."

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

If I remember correct Rand Fishkin says in this webinar that it's gonna hurt, but you may want to watch it to be 100%! I remember it being sometime after 40-50% of the webinar I think. http://www.seomoz.org/dp/pro-webinar-october-2010-with-rand-fishkin

Good luck!

[AlanMosley]

yes it will be seen as duplicate,

yes i would use rel=canonical so that the one site is getting ranked, but then your other sites wont rank so well.

you could 301 redirect them all to the same site then do somthing iun the code to present the 5% of changes to the correct users.

but then you have the pproblem of .com not ranking as well as .com.au in Australia.
if you want to keep the .com  and the .com.au then you really need to make sites that are different

unless you can afford to maintain 2 vastly diffeernt sites, and can afford 2 SEO campains,  i would 301 redirect to the one url. if you have links pointing to both domains then doing a 301 redirect will assign all link juice to one site, you may see a boost in the search engines.