recently i found a website say X on a particular theme...in its liks directory i found another website say Y...when i visited Y noticed that it had exactly same content as the website X, word to word..(by content i mean the written material) i hope i am not wrong here ...but Y had different design and layout...and in the links directory of Y there was link for X...obviouly they must be having a common webmaster...X has 518 pages indexed on Google and Y has 318... my question is arent these kind of sites banned by search engines...isnt this duplicate content... thanx for reading...i thot this is the appropriate place to post this questions.. thanks Anticipating good response..
Yes, this would trigger the duplicate content penalty in search engines. Although I am not sure whether they would be banned. However, one of them would rank much lower in the SERPs. Just wondering, are both pages cached in Google? I have also noticed that the dupe content penalty is not immediate. If the sites are fairly new, Google might take some time before it realises the dupe content.