Would this incur a penalty for duplicate content?

[Marcomguy]

A prospective client has two websites with two different URLs, but with identical content. The two home pages have different headers, so that one says "Business A" and the other says "Business B." But all other content is the same.

Would one of the sites be penalized by Google for duplicate content?

[nsbeasley]

I could be wrong, but I think that the answer is yes, the site would be penalized. Google looks at the entire content of a site, not just the header. If it is the same, it will not work. Quality, unique content is a must for any web page to be successful. If there is anything I have learned in my 6 years as an internet copywriter, it is that.

[Pack-Secure]

Yes, it would.

[KristineS]

Why couldn't you just point one URL to the other URL and just have one site?

[Freelancier]

I think the point is to get Google to index it twice, so yes it'll likely be penalized for breaking Google's ever-changing rules.

[Harold Mansfield]

Not sure about the duplicate content penalty, but as far as overall web marketing, it's redundant, a waste or resources and totally unnecessary. Why have 2 URL's competing with each other for the same content? Not only that but it lacks credibility. Anyone who sees both sites will wonder what you are trying to pull. Why are you marketing the same company under 2 different names?

[Ted]

At first you would see pages from both sites ranking in the search results. (anywhere from a few days to a few months)

The one with the most Google PageRank would probably outrank the other one, unless one of them has a keyword in the domain name or URL.

If neither site has any inbound links to it at all (identical minimum amount of PageRank) and the keyword is not present in the URL on either site, then (on a page by page basis) the page that was first indexed by Google would outrank the other competing one.

Then once Google runs its next Google Panda iteration, the site that has more pages ranking lower than the other one will be filtered by the Panda. (This was one of the original intents of the Google Panda update.)

Therefore none of the pages on that site would appear high in the search results again unless a person searched for that site's domain name specifically.

[Marcomguy]

Thanks for all the feedback. My first reaction when the prospect told me about this was, "that's duplicate content, and if Google hasn't caught on yet, they will and penalize you." So thanks for confirming my suspicion.

As Freelancier said, they probably did it to get Google to index them twice under two different sets of keywords. The kicker is that they had been paying an SEO company a monthly fee all this time!

I'll see if I can investigate further.

[bulk]

Nice SEO company, I would say.
I'm really curious what they wanted to do by having two sites with duplicate content. Cannot find any sense in it.

[DeniseTaylor]

The site that Google detects as the copier would get the hit. It is usually the one who posts later. However, this is not always the case. If someone does have their content copied, there are steps that can be taken to pursue the offending site owner.

[60mobile]

If your prospect is just trying to rank for different keywords, I have some input from personal experience:

With the newest Panda updates, I believe it's easier to rank for keywords that do not match the top-level-domain. This is because Google wants to discourage spammy 3-page websites that just have a really long and targeted url. Many of these sites do not really help the visitor answer his or her question, but instead are just Adsense wheels with freelance content and landing pages optimized for someone to click Adsense inks.

What I'm getting at with all of this, is that your prospect can do SEO for the same domain, using different keywords, as long as the content is really relevant. IMHO, this is the best long-term solution, rather than relying on loopholes in Google's algorithm, which they are constantly trying to close.

[Marcomguy]

The prospect became a client, and the first order of business is changing the content on the two sites. That is currently under way.

Their content is fine, and now we need more of it because there are two websites to populate, not two duplicates of one site.

It turned out there were good reasons for having two sites because the client has two businesses that are somewhat related, but different enough that they couldn't be put on one site without confusing visitors. So it was a sound concept, just executed poorly. And actually, executed in a way that was detrimental to one of their businesses.

Thanks for all your insights!

[charlesgalofre]

:) you probably dont need another vote for this one, but yes it is considered duplicate content.

[justinm]

Yes, 100%. If any two sites have the same content it is duplicate. There is a threshold level though, as there are millions of sites that say,""welcome to -----"". SO if it is a few sentences I would not worry much, but identical content of both sites, big NO NO.