PR 5 to 0

I have 2 domain names, one of which points to the other. One ranks well on Google, the other on Yahoo. Just the other day the PR on both domains dropped from 5 to 0. The secondary domain is arranged so that the url stays the same even though the content resides under the other domain. This is what it looks like:

www.maindomain.com/page1
www.seconddomain.com/page1

These pages both reflect the same content. Is this format against Google's duplicate content rules? It seems fairly obvious that it is but it would be awful to lose a good ranking on one search engine. Should I just not worry about losing the PR, the site has stayed near the top. Thanks for any suggestions.

 

This is duplicate content. Fullstop.

The PR problem could just be a temporary glitch and anyway is of no real importance in getting your positions.

However you do run a real risk with your duplicate content so IMHO I would rewrite the content sufficiently for the SE to notice the difference without altering the positions.

 

The answer is simple:

Using robots.txt file ban yahoo from visiting one site and ban google from visiting. Also keep in mind that you dont ban the site from google where it has fetched a ranking already.

Regards,
Dilip Samuel

 

thanks, I will try the robots.txt dissallow to see if the PR comes back.