Similar websites count?

Do similar websites count?

[AcesHigh]

Lets say I have www.shoestore.com website doing well in the ranks. Lets say I go and purchase another domain www.shoestore.net or .ca and use some but not much of the same content except change the meta tags and title, pics, some links. Will I get penalized for this? How could they tell? Would this benefit for traffic if it had some minor differences, but related to the same company?

[Birdman]

I would concentrate my efforts on one site to make it the best around. To answer your question, there are already many people doing it successfully. Personally, I wouldn't.

[webconnoisseur]

I was recently researching one of the keywords I wanted to target and found that 9 of the top 10 google results were basically copies of the same site registered under different domain names and linking to eachother. Makes it really tough to break into. Needless to say, I reported the search results to google because the sites actually had no content, just hundreds of links to their various sites.

There are some shady companies that guarantee top-10 results and that is exactly how they do it: the purchase thousands of site names and link back and forth. I imagine Google spends a great deal of time developing formulas to keep this from working - it seems like eventually search engines might tie in site domain names with whois information to see who owns the site, but there is always a way (especially if they are using their clients address, etc.)

[aspdesigner]

If the duplicate page filter decides several pages are the same, it will remove all but one of them from the index. So no, I would not recommend doing this.