Multiple Sites

What are the risks?

[nooob]

Hello all,
Long time reader first time poster. A client of mine has a bit of a dilema. A while back their main site was hit with a PR0 penalty. After a couple of months they decided to start from scratch and developed a new site (bigger and better) to rank on Google.

The new site is complete however the old site's PR has been restored and ranks very well once again. The dilema:

If they release the new site will they risk their ranking with the old site? Can google or any other bots detect this if they are hosted on different servers? Both sites share the same Database but are built very differently. i.e. the sites dont share the same exact wording but they do have the same products.

Is there a possibility Google could drop both sites? I read once if the expect dupe content they only drop the one with the lower PR. Is that true?

Any advice/help/suggestions are appreciated.

[nancyb]

My experience:

Old (forgotten) personal site with only a few low PR links was kept in place of the main domain which had lots of high PR links and significantly more content.

Products were the same on both sites, but they were on different servers, had different layouts and did not link to each other. However, both sites did share the same shopping cart.

Added googlebot noindex,nofollow tags on all pages of the old personal site, when that didn't work used an .htaccess to 301 googlebot to the domain. Although that got the old personal site removed from the index, the domain has still not returned to its prior PR.

I don't think you can count on google keeping the site with higher PR and more content. And, if you get penalized it can last forever. There were never any spam techniques used on either site, only the domain was/is in DMOZ and Yahoo directories so I don't know what the criteria was for removing the domain instead of the personal ISP site except it was the oldest since it was created before purchasing a domain.