I had a site with Adsense that was doing pretty well for me (as a newb). For May & June, I averaged 16.5 visits and over 135 page views per day. Almost all of this was coming from Yahoo, where I was somehow in the top 3-7 on the front page. This is the first site that I've really put any effort into, and I'd done no SEO at all, so needless to say I was surprised & pretty happy. Since this site was doing so well, I created two other websites about the very same product that is sold under two other brand names. I copied/pasted the content, changing the brand names. So now I have: brand1productsite.com brand2productsite.com brand3productsite.com Again, other than the brand names, everything on the three sites is exactly the same. Since July 1, I noticed an almost immediate drop in traffic to the first site. From July 1 till today, I'm at only 11.5 visits and 91 pageviews (about a 30% drop) and I'm at the bottom of the 2nd page on Yahoo. That made me wonder - Do search engines penalize or blacklist when they see more than one site with what appears to be duplicate content? Is the dropoff in my traffic related to the two new, virtually identical sites? I'd kinda be surprised if the answer is yes. Would Yahoo's SE algorithm recognize a "duplicate" site within hours of me uploading the "duplicate" content? Is the dropoff just normal? Like I said, I really haven't done any SEO at all. I've been concentrating on getting more/better content. Should I take urgent action, like taking the two "duplicate" sites offline until I can re-word their content? Or should I just re-word it over time?
Yes, but there are a lot of conditions to that. Basically there are so many things to consider, it is hard to say for sure what is happening. However if you have the same IP address, same meta information, same everything, except for the brand names, then it will probably be flagged as spam... however... This can happen too. If you were ranking well for a word, but your competitors overtook you, or you had links that were suddenly deemed unworthy, it could be for any number of reasons....
I don't think just making copies can have such effects. Otherwise it will become really easy for everyone to bring a competitor down.
Just reporting back.. The two "copy" sites are doing quite well. One is the 2nd result listed on Yahoo, the other is the 6th result. The original site is still down on the 3rd page of Yahoo. So, it seems pretty clear that Yahoo doesn't penalize hard or quickly for this type of duplication. With that said, I have been working on them a bit while doing some other SEO stuff. Basically, I've changed up the h1 titles on top of each page's text so that all three sites are unique (beyond the brand names). Next up, meta tags, which I will also make unique for each site. And then finally, I will change up some of the content text to further differentiate the three sites.