I have to totally different situations I want to discuss, however... I am going to put them both here since they are partially related. 1) Duplicate Content on www1,www2,www3 locations. We see this all the time, php.net does this and it is very common practice. Multiple servers, mulitple locations... same content, different name/ip. Does Google or any other search engine count points against you for having www.domain.com, www2.domain.com and www3.domain.com as duplicate sites/content? If you think so or if you don't think so, please explain your thought process and an example or personal experience. I realize it is possible to build infrastructure to support www.domain.com to go to different IPs and la-de-da, but that is not my question. 2) One Site, Two Domains Let's say you have two seperate sites and you are merging them together. For marketing reasons alone (not SEO) it is determined that it is in the best interest of the two site to reamin seperate but equal, at least for a period of time. By seperate, I mean, they maintain their own theme look and feel, but equal in the sense that once registered on one site, you are free to flow to the other and the content and location of that content is all the same. What and by how much will Google ding you for doing this? Obviously, the motivation is not to create duplicate sites with duplicate content, but to keep names seperate while the sites merge and eventually become one. What level of duplication is the threshold? 10%, 50%, 100%? One might say, one not keep the sites content seperate from each other and obviously that is one solution, but that is not the ideal situation, thus the question. Thanks!