I have two sites for two different geographic locations. They contain allot of the same content/pages. The newer site is sucking eggs in Google and always has. I am assuming that Google is penalizing my new site for plagiarizing the older site. Is this possible?
In my opinion geographic locations is no bar in Internet. Whole Internet site come into one umbrella. And Spider understand only link and text, in that case you might penalized.
No, because Google's algorithm is not capable of doing that. If you search for 'stealing content', you'll find lots of posts all over the web about one site copying content from another and Google gives to the thief the vitim's position in the SERPs. Google does not know who the original author is. Google's algorithm is stupid. Google's algorithm is great at returning relevant pages for a search compared to other SEs, but that's where it's intelligence stops. Oh, btw, you can do a search without Google's inept dupe content filter by prefixing or sufixing your keywords with &filter=0 Bompa