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Short answer: Avoid it.

You want to avoid duplicating any kind of copy from one website to another as much as possible. If there's a need to do it (for instance, a blog post from the parent company could be useful to the audience of a smaller company) there's always the ability to use a canonical to identify the preferred (original) source in order to help Google identify which one should be given credit/indexed. Even with that, a canonical is simply a suggestion and not a definite order. Google can choose to ignore it if it wishes.

But in the instance of website copy that talks about a product or service where you want the ability for both pages to rank, I would invest the time in rewriting the content so it's specific to that website and avoid duplication as much as possible. As an example, the company that provides after-sales support has a definite point of differentiation. That could become a good chunk of the copy to help dilute it, along with rewriting the other parts of the copy as well. If you're trying to rank both websites for similar (or the same) keywords, you're going to end up forcing Google to make a choice between the two if a good chunk of the second website is just a replication of the first.

Investing the time in unique copy will be worth it. Hope this helps.

Hi there,

I do have a great recommendation for a company that handles content ideation, creation and management called Passion Fruit Creative Group. I'm unsure of the prices, since they really vary depending on the type of content and other needs, but I've personally worked with both of the co-founders in the past and they're excellent.

Here's a link to their website and contact form so you can check them out and get in touch:

http://passionfruitcreativegroup.com/contact/

Take a quick peek at their backlink profiles and top metrics once a month to see if they've had any changes in their strategies or partnerships that you're able to see. I would also monitor mentions of their brand (social and blogs/publications). It'll keep your finger on the pulse of who is talking about them, what they're doing, who they're partnering with, what kind of press they're getting etc.

We typically do quarterly reviews of competitors. This involved a lot of different things, for example, we may look at their top metrics (backlinks, referring domains, anchor percentages) to notice any major changes, look at their visibility (where they're ranking overall in the space for whatever buckets/topics we're monitoring), what kind of pickup they've gotten, if they're heavy publishers then we look at what content went out that month and how it performed, amongst other things. The depth and items really vary because it's tailored to the client, what we initially found during the auditing phase, and what kind of strategy we've implemented.

Daniel,

I've worked on a few site migrations, and it does take some time for rankings to pick back up. One recent one that I worked on took about 3-4 weeks to get relatively close to where rankings were pre-migration. As long as you're positive you used 301 [permanent] page to page redirects and not 302s, the rankings should eventually get back to where they were.

If you tweaked any of the titles from what they were previously, that could also have something to do with it.

I would also hold off on creating a lot of geographical and genre landing pages that weren't there previously. Let Google have some time to crawl the site as it is without needing to constantly index more content. In the meantime, it may be worth working on getting some fresh links to the new site while the redirects/rankings fully take.

Give it some time. Good luck!

Short answer: Avoid it.

You want to avoid duplicating any kind of copy from one website to another as much as possible. If there's a need to do it (for instance, a blog post from the parent company could be useful to the audience of a smaller company) there's always the ability to use a canonical to identify the preferred (original) source in order to help Google identify which one should be given credit/indexed. Even with that, a canonical is simply a suggestion and not a definite order. Google can choose to ignore it if it wishes.

But in the instance of website copy that talks about a product or service where you want the ability for both pages to rank, I would invest the time in rewriting the content so it's specific to that website and avoid duplication as much as possible. As an example, the company that provides after-sales support has a definite point of differentiation. That could become a good chunk of the copy to help dilute it, along with rewriting the other parts of the copy as well. If you're trying to rank both websites for similar (or the same) keywords, you're going to end up forcing Google to make a choice between the two if a good chunk of the second website is just a replication of the first.

Investing the time in unique copy will be worth it. Hope this helps.

Daniel,

I've worked on a few site migrations, and it does take some time for rankings to pick back up. One recent one that I worked on took about 3-4 weeks to get relatively close to where rankings were pre-migration. As long as you're positive you used 301 [permanent] page to page redirects and not 302s, the rankings should eventually get back to where they were.

If you tweaked any of the titles from what they were previously, that could also have something to do with it.

I would also hold off on creating a lot of geographical and genre landing pages that weren't there previously. Let Google have some time to crawl the site as it is without needing to constantly index more content. In the meantime, it may be worth working on getting some fresh links to the new site while the redirects/rankings fully take.

Give it some time. Good luck!

Take a quick peek at their backlink profiles and top metrics once a month to see if they've had any changes in their strategies or partnerships that you're able to see. I would also monitor mentions of their brand (social and blogs/publications). It'll keep your finger on the pulse of who is talking about them, what they're doing, who they're partnering with, what kind of press they're getting etc.

We typically do quarterly reviews of competitors. This involved a lot of different things, for example, we may look at their top metrics (backlinks, referring domains, anchor percentages) to notice any major changes, look at their visibility (where they're ranking overall in the space for whatever buckets/topics we're monitoring), what kind of pickup they've gotten, if they're heavy publishers then we look at what content went out that month and how it performed, amongst other things. The depth and items really vary because it's tailored to the client, what we initially found during the auditing phase, and what kind of strategy we've implemented.

Hi there,

I do have a great recommendation for a company that handles content ideation, creation and management called Passion Fruit Creative Group. I'm unsure of the prices, since they really vary depending on the type of content and other needs, but I've personally worked with both of the co-founders in the past and they're excellent.

Here's a link to their website and contact form so you can check them out and get in touch:

http://passionfruitcreativegroup.com/contact/