Would this incur a penalty for duplicate content?

[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.