Microsite & Ducplicate Content Concern

[cmosnod]

I have a client that wants to put up a micro-site.  It's not really even a niche micro-site, it's his whole site less a category and a few other pages.  He is a plastic surgeon that offers cosmetic surgery services for the Face, Breast, and Body at his private practice in City A.  He has partnered with another surgeon in City B who's surgical services are limited to only the Face.  City B is nearby, but not so close that they consider themselves competitors for Facial surgery.  The doctors agreement is that my client will perform only Breast and Body surgery at the City B location.  He can market himself in City B (which he currently is not doing on his main site) but only for Breast and Body procedures and is not to compete for Facial surgery. Therefore, he needs this second site to not include content about Facial surgery.

My concern is duplicate content.  His request plan:  the micro-site will be on different domain and C-block, the content, location keywords and meta data will be completely re-written and target City B.  However, he wants to use the same theme of his main site - same source code, html/css, same top level navigation, same sub-navigation less the Face section, same images/graphics, same forms, etc.

Is it okay to have the same exact site build on a different domain with rewritten copy (less a few pages) to target the same base keywords with only a different location?  The site is intended for a different user group in City B, but I'm concerned the search engines won't like this and trigger the filters.

I've read a bunch of duplicate content articles including this post panda by Dr. Pete.  Great post, but doesn't really answer this particular issue of duplicating code for a related site.

Can anyone make a case for or against this?

Thanks in advance!

[BenFox]

Definite plus one to that.

[BedeFahey]

Someone might disagree with me, but I don't think it will be an issue. To some extent, it seems to me that what you're describing happens pretty regularly anyway.

Take, say, the Thesis theme for WordPress. Hundreds or even thousands of people use it. I'm sure there are businesses out there that use the same basic navigation (Home, About Us, Services, Contact) and who don't customize it very much. That means that the only significant difference is the content. I haven't ever heard of this being a problem.

A similar (though not identical) situation occurs sites my company develops for our clients  We start the coding on many of them with the TwentyTen/Eleven themes, as they provide a solid base. While the sites look totally different, the core pieces of the code, the majority of the classes and ID's, the HTML structure, are the same. The only real difference is the CSS. Again, because they're small/medium businesses, they often have very similar navigation structure. So far we haven't had any trouble ranking them.

Anecdotal evidence that doesn't fit your situation perfectly, I know, but my gut feeling is that you'll be fine so long as the content is unique.

From a user experience, you might want to consider at least convincing him to change any photos out. Nothing says cloned site like identical images.

[BenFox]

I worked on a couple of a sites in the travel sector that did this a few years back and it was fine. I wouldn't foresee it being a problem today either (although if anyone has evidence to the contrary I'd love to hear it).

I'm assuming that there are reasons why your client can't just create his City B content in a sub-folder of his City A site. Maybe the name of City A is in the domain or something?