Can you use no-index to counter duplicate content across separate domains?
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Hi Moz Community,
I have a client who is splitting out a sub brand from a company website to its own domain.
They have lots of content around the theme and they want to migrate most of the content out to the new domain, but they also wanted to keep that content on the main site as the main site gets lots of traffic.
My question is, as they want search traffic to go to the new site, but want to keep the best content on the original site too, so it can be found in the nav, if they no-index identical content on main site and index content on the new site will they still be penalised for duplicate content?
Our advice has been to keep the thematic content on both sites but make them different enough so they are not considered duplicate - we routinely write the same blog post in 50 different ways for them but their Head of Web asked if the no-index is a route, which means they don't need to pay for and wait for brand new content?
They are comfortable in losing traffic until the new domain gets traction.
In theory, if they are telling Google not to index or rank the main site content, the new site shouldn't be penalised but I'm not confident giving that advice as I've never been asked to do this before.
Thoughts?
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no
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