Does Google Penalize for One Business, Two Web Sites?

I have a client who is a lawyer. He created two separate web sites for his practice, one for bankruptcy law, and one for personal injury law.

I did some SEO work on his personal injury site. There were two things that set off red flags. First, he listed both of his sites on Google Maps but the personal injury site never showed up. Second is that he told me, "My personal injury site used to show up in Google searches. Now it doesn't."

Before I started working on his site, it didn't show up for keywords in the first 20 pages, maybe not at all (I only checked 20 pages). After I finished working on the site and after Google re-indexed the site, I still couldn't find the site in a keyword search.

Based on the competition's sites, and number of hits for the keywords, I believe his site should appear in the first 10 pages.

I figured out that the reason that his site didn't show up in Google Maps was most likely because it says you can only have one site listed for one business at one location. Fair enough. He didn't know.

Is this also a reason that the site may have been penalized in web search? I didn't see anything in Google's Guidelines that says a business or law firm can't have two web sites. If I can eliminate this as a source of a problem, how can I find out if he has done anything that would have gotten his site penalized? I'd like to know definitively because I can't tell him to get rid of his current two websites and start a new one just on my supposition.

I should mention that the site appears if I search for his name. All the pages on his site appear if I search for site:www.xyz.com (obviously, xyz isn't the actual name of his site.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Marc

 

Multiple websites to promote a business are unnecessary expenditure because
it would it involved lot of duplications which are no good for the SEs.

Can anybody name any successful biz having multiple sites?

 

Why multiple sites for one same business? If it can be solve by one site. If you have multiple sites, you have to make more efforts too.

 

If you have the same content on both sites it would be 'punishable', otherwise it shouldn't be a problem. I have a few different health blogs and even though they're all health related, the sub-niches are different (and no dupe content) and everything is fine

 

What BlackPirateFlag said is right. Your content on both the sites must not be same or duplicate, otherwise there should not be any problem.
And there is no such matter of penalization even if there is same content, but in this case your first made site will come in SE and not the other one.

 

no matter of business contents should not be duplicated

 

The sites don't have duplicate content. The reason that he did it was because he wanted to get a listing in a web site that's affiliated with a locak radio show on the law. Once he signed up under "personal injury," the site wouldn't let him use the same e-mail address and URL to add a listing for "bankruptcy."

I just found one of the pages of the site on page 12 in Google search. This is odd, because it's not the home page. At least I know the site wasn't penalized.

 

I see no problem with this. Car mfg's create corporate sites and sites for their brands all the time.

 

Theoretically you are allowed to have more than one website for a particular business. Google just wants you to put enough effort into each website. If they see anything too similar between the two websites they may penalize you.

Perhaps there is some other problem with the website which we wouldn't know without seeing the url. Do these 2 websites cross link between each other? Do these websites have very similar link profiles? Is the site accessible with and without the www (in other words, do you have a redirect from one version)? Is there anything at all spammy on the website? Does the website participate in link exchanges or other link schemes?

 

I don't see any problem with creating two sites for one business. For as long as each site is "unique" in terms of its tags and contents, Google won't penalize it. Making duplicate sites is a total no no.

 

having two websites for one business was not a problem but it only requires more work for you need to optimize the two websites,