is there any search engine penalty for having an identical copy of a site at a different domain?
thanks
I think there is a penalty for duplicate pages but not sure for domains.
Google's clever enough to spot two sites the same, not sure if it will penalise so to speak but it does run the risk.
We use different URL's and front ends to the same datbase backend, changing page titles, styles, content and so on so that we do get recognised by the spiders as being two seperate entities. now both get traffic and interlink page rankings have gone up.
It probably won't penalise (there can be legitimate reasons for having two sites bring up the same content) but it probably won't add anything either.
Aaron
thanks everyone
i thought after posting this that it must be ok as there are plenty of mirror sites out there
the reason i'm doing this is because we have an australian business who have a .com domain and when using google/yahoo and in aus, if you select australian only pages, it filters on .com.au etc. and they don't get found
no penalites, but i was wondering what is the benefit? if you have same or close ranks, then there is same probability to get hits, and if you put different keywords, then merge them and put them in one....
there is no benefit on this, and that is why there is no pnelties....
because if you have a .com domain and people filter so only .com.au .net.au pages show etc. then your pages aren't shown at all as no .com pages are present in the results