Why are these blackhat sites so successful?

[nowmedia1]

Here's an interesting conundrum. Here are three sites with their respective ranking for "dental implants [city]:"

http://dentalimplantsvaughan.ca - 9 (on google.ca)

http://dentalimplantsinhonoluluhi.com - 2 (on google.com)

http://dentalimplantssurreybc.ca - 7 (on google.ca)

These markets are not particularly competitive, however, all of these sites suffer from:

• Duplicate content, both internally and across sites (all of this company's implant sites have the same exact content, minus the bio pages and the local modifier).
• Average speed score.
• No structured data
• No links

And these sites are ranking relatively quickly. The Vaughan site went live 3 months ago.

But, what's boggling my mind is that they rank on the first page at all. It seems they're doing the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do, yet they rank relatively well.

[nowmedia1]

Interesting: view-source:http://dentalimplantssurreybc.ca/faqs/

view-source:http://dentalimplantssurreybc.ca/faqs/

[tdawson09]

Not a bad looking site. Google does allow for duplicate content across multi-regional sites. And sometimes a new site will get an initial boost then drop back down. Also, if there is not a lot of localized website competition, Google will rank them as the most relevant for this category in Hawaii.

[ClaytonJ]

I have similar sites I have reviewed.  It comes down to the - exact marching url.  Plus the space has to be not overly competitive. No doubt there is 600 other factors but the dominant standout is the url. Ironically once there tough to dislodge, unless the site dislodging is 10 x 's better - cannot be just twice as good... .

[nowmedia1]

Even if those sites are for different practices/businesses?

[tdawson09]

Yes, if they are different businesses, they should be treated differently.

[nowmedia1]

So, suppose a site is #1. It's for a bakery in Atlanta, Georgia. The content is doing really well. You're telling me that, as a bakery in San Diego CA, I can take that content, slap it on my site, replace the business name and location information, and it'd be okay?

[nowmedia1]

I guess what baffles me is that there's duplicate, spammy content. Exactly what Google tells you to stay away from.

[tdawson09]

Not exactly. When it comes to different countries, like the example domains you listed above. (.com and .ca) Google allows for mirrored or duplicate sites by country.

When it comes to multiple sites in the same country, Google will give value to the first use of the content, then no value to the 2nd use. In the example you gave of San Diego and Atlanta, it is important to create unique content, citations and backlinks that are localized to that site's location.

I have a client that has two separate appliance companies in the same area and two separate websites. I've used some of the same general content on both, but have content that is unique to both, along with unique links, and they both rank really well.