Does Google permit high quality, unique, duplicate sites?

[born2drv]

I just submitted 3 sites in the report abuse form for Google, which I consider spam. But I can see how surfers would not know the difference and even perhaps find them useful.

This is the basic scenario. One extremely competitve field has 3 major players, multi-million dollar companies. This company has spun off smaller sites (which in themselves are somewhat large) in a smaller category (dominating 2 categies and getting huge traffic).

The spammy part is, all products found on the smaller sites are all found in the main site, and they are all owned by the same company (even go so far as to say gift certificates are redeemable at each site).

But all sites are "unique looking", have their own 800#, etc. You can tell considerable work went into them. Would Google consider this spam? I know GoogleGuy said he would look into the abuse reports and there were not many coming in, so I am hoping that I'll get an answer of whether or not this is acceptable. One of the "spin off" sites even has a PR8, as does the main site. So Google obviously considers the site to be valueable.

If it is acceptable for one site owner or company to create multiple sites so long as they all look very different, appear unique, and are even useful to surfers.... but still sell the same products, then perhaps I will make a few more sites myself to keep up.

[Go60Guy]

Lets look at this from the viewpoint of Joe Surfer. Joe's looking for a specially made putter with blue widgets built into it. He's never heard of MegaSportsStore.Com which has 123 different websites devoted to golf and golf products.

Joe comes accross MiniGolfSite.Com on Google, one of the 123 sites owned by MegaSportsStore.Com, and lo and behold, there's his putter staring right at him. He orders it and can't wait to get it, and he still has never heard of MegaSportsStore.Com which, of course, also carries his putter.

Now, Joe could care less about whether the mega store exists or not. All he cares about is that he found what he was searching for and that someone enabled him to find it. And, here's the catcher, listed just below the mini site on Google was another site not owned by the mega store, but owned by, Gulp!, an affiliate of the mega store and featuring the same putter. Joe could have clicked on that site, and all manner of horrors would have occurred. The worst among them is that the affiliate would have earned a commission. What's this world coming to?

[makemetop]

>Google has no way of knowing that John Doe owns both CoolWidgets.com and GroovyWidgets.com...

If any of us can find this out, I'm sure Google can. What do you think whois data is for?

[FlashRed]

makemetop - yes that's true, however there is no way that Google is going to do a whois search and compare on every permutation of every site in their database.

[budterm]

Plus, how would a bot know if "aliases" or fictitious names were used?