Hey, I would like to clone my site at mysite.com to mysite2.com so that I can use the same database and content with both but have a different name and theme. Will search engines 'punish' me for doing this? I think I read somewhere that duplicate content gets held against you? Any thoughts on whether I should do this? P.S Why can't I delete the spam PMs I've received? Extremely annoying having the pop up on every page.
yes, it will be duplicate content and the second site will be penalized and will be dropped from google indexing
correct. Its a no-no. While the first site may not suffer, the clone will. Make it unique, obviously, and the problem goes away.
I have had the same situation with 2 websites: http://www.citybutterflies.com and http://www.citybutterflies.co.uk - what I did I wrote unique content for the major pages (2 of them), changed the Meta of main gallery pages, nofollowed some pages and it works just great!
it is called shadow in term of Google you have to re direct the whole website. its a long process, how to redirect the website if it gains the popularity as well. read "successful moving of the site : suhaana khan" in same forum
What sultanofseo said is correct, it will be duplicate content and your mysite2.com will be penalized by Google.
although it will create a duplicate content problem but there is nothing like punishment. it is a misconception. actually what search engines do is that they crawl the website and index all the content. after some time if they come across a different website with the same content it has already indexed it will simply ignore the site and will not index. if you want it to get indexed you need to change the content of the website
Did you check the back links for your both sites. .com getting 41 links and other getting 0 If you using URL redirect techniques you will get more back links and good SERP.
Agree with your comment, But this doesn't answer the question of blinkor. In the case you have mentioned in your post, the website having original content won't suffer the action of Google penalty... But the website that has copied the content without giving the reference of original website, would have to face the heat of Google actions...