I have a client competitor that has duplicate content (websites) in 2 places.... he has one automotive group site...and each make has a sub domain and a duplicate site at another domain....example: lutherhopkinshonda.lutherauto.com and www.lutherhopkinshonda .com these 2 sites are exactly the same but on 2 different domains! I thought you got in trouble with Google for this type of thing.....but he ranks well....the lutherauto.com site has over 15k indexed pages and 15kbacklinks with a PR of 5!
Well you have the power to report this as spam to Google. They might at least remove one version from their index. It is unlikely that Google would actually penalize them though. It's worth a try anyway.
it's the link juice that gives them the rankings. Although, as you say, strange google haven't dumped one or the other into the supplementals. It could be that they are cloaking - serving up something different to google than what they show you.
i agree, report them to uncle G! i had a competitor of one of my sites do them same thing and reported them...all their mirrored sites lost their ranking
Well this guy has been doing this for years....and benefiting. So obviously he knows something I do not....maybe I should follow his lead and do the same thing?
er... he is 'lucky'. Google's systems aren't 100% guaranteed (what is???). You try it, you'll get slapped pretty hard. That's known as 'Murphy's law'.