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.