Competitor owns two domains which are essentially duplicates. Is this allowed?

[bpharris9014]

Hello everyone,One of my competitors has two E-commerce sites that are almost exactly the same. The company re-branded a few years ago (changed the company name, changed the domain name) but kept the first domain live which is still fairly successful. Their re-branded website is a Top 1000 retailer.The thing is, both websites are essentially the EXACT SAME. They have the same products (with the same item #'s), the same pricing, the same copy and product descriptions, the same contact info, same layout, etc. The internal search bar on the first domain even redirects to their current site! The only real difference are the brand names. Currently, both sites are ranking very well for some very competitive keywords. For the past two years, I kept waiting for Google to penalize one (or both) of them for duplication. But for some reason Google seems to have not noticed. **Is there any way to "show google" site duplication they might be missing?**Thanks!

[crackingmedia]

Hi Bryan

Have you tried reporting through Google's web spam report?

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

It's not quite the issue you have but it may at least bring the issue to Google's attention.

Peter

[SorinaDascalu]

Two websites with the same content is not web spam... I don't think this approach will work.
Maybe the content is not really the same - what we see as "the content" may not be the same for Google. Maybe the older website ranks because it has authority and the newer one, even if it has the same products and descriptions maybe it has a lot of client reviews that makes Google not consider it duplicate since the reviews add value and original content...

[crackingmedia]

I agree with you Sorina. As I said, what Bryan is reporting is not really an issue of web spam, but using the Google web spam report might bring the two sites to Google's attention to at least look at the issue.

Without being able to see able to see the two sites and compare them to see if the content on both of them is substantially the same as Bryan has suggested this is a bit of a head scratcher. We can only speculate about, but I guess Bryan may not be too keen on a public forum to post the URLs.

Peter

[bpharris9014]

Thank you for your responses. I will look into maybe calling attention to this via the webspam report.