Google’s John Mueller replied to a webmaster who is tasked with merging and migrating three different web sites into a single web site. John gave him advice in the Google Webmaster Help thread – the typical advice and encouragement you’d expect from a Googler. But he did tell the webmaster not to worry about duplicate content when doing the migration.

John wrote, “don’t worry about duplicate content in the meantime.” Here is the full recommendation:

I guess John is saying, do the merge, let things settle and pick up. Then as you see certain pages ranking and you want to adjust that, then maybe merge some duplicate pages afterwards. But first, migrate the sites together and track it before you merge multiple pages into one?

I’ve seen many cases of merging two sites into one, but three – that is not always that common.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.