Duplicate Websites

[ResslerMotors]

What would you do if a competitor had their main domain, and then another domain targeting your local area with the same exact content?

That's currently happening to me, and I'm not sure what I should do about it, if anything:

http://www.bozemanchevrolet.com

and

http://www.montanachevy.com

[EGOL]

What would you do if a competitor had their main domain, and then another domain targeting your local area with the same exact content?

This would not bother me at all.

I have seen it a lot over the past ten years.  Watching these competitors for that long tells me that duplicate sites usually do not exist on the first page of google for a long time - at least not where there is any serious competition.  One of them usually disappears.

What can you do?  I would hope that competitor builds identical domain #3.

[Bevelwise]

There isn't really anything you can do to impact this.  This is not a good strategy for your competitor, and I'm not even sure how much it could potentially be benefiting them.  Google will realize the duplicate content and then serve the page that has a higher authority as the result that actually matters.  If I do a search for bozeman chevroletand montana chevy I actually see the Montana Chevy website coming up for it's root domain search, but even when I search the exact match Bozeman Chevrolet it doesn't even come up on the first page.  This tells me that Google has established the origin of the content and higher authority domain as the Montana Chevy website.  In reality that may be true or false, but that's what Google has decided.  If you run OSE reports on both domains you'll see why Google has decided the Montana Chevy is of higher importance because of all the links that point to it.

I would just let your competitor go about doing this, because I don't believe it actually gives them any real benefit.