I understand about backlinks, however I have spotted a competitor who has a PR4 site (parent site) and they are building up their "OWN" network of authority (I think) but the content are articles copied exactly from their parent site however doing a google search for the main keyword of the parent site they do appear on page 1 of Google! So is all that we hear about duplicate content rubbish? If not how come they are doing this with a number of sites? And why? To clarify, they have registered domains in April 2010 and importing their blog archive to new domains with 1 link in blogroll pointing to parent site - WHY? If anyone can shed any light on this it would be appreciated or am I missing something?
There isn't a "penalty" for duplicate content, it's just that google tends to show results from the higher authority site. Who knows why they are doing it - perhaps they are branching out in their niche and using keywords in the new domains to gain benefit for other keywords? Importing the same content into multiple sites shows they really aren't going about it the right way - unless they are just aging the domains and will replace the content with unique articles down the road. Whatever they are doing, it isn't going to benefit their main site.
cheers, I thought I would do something similar with unique articles (will involve more work) but will be worth it, I think and hope.
Obviously it works if they are #1. I have seen similar schemes that are successful but they are not exact duplicates just very similar. Are the new domains on different IPs? How many do they have? Just curious.