Duplicate content sites - now acceptable in Google?

[dhatz]

I've noticed many cases, where people register dozens of keyword-ladden .biz/.info domains and subsequently employ the following content structure:

widgets.com/blue/
widgets.com/red/
widgets.com/green/

blue-widgets.com/ (same content as widgets.com/blue/ )
red-widgets.com/
green-widgets.com/

etc

The exact same content is published across several domains (sometimes individual sites may have slightly different looks, e.g. another background color, via CSS).

Such duplicate content sites seem to dominate the SERPs for some keywords. In fact I just checked and the first 3 (three) of Google's first-page results for a competitive 2-keyword travel industry search query ("XYZ hotels") belong to the very same web company and are duplicate content sites.

The people doing it seem to be straightforward about it, the sites are interlinked via footer and the Whois data point to the same company.

Finally, note that this is not an isolated example, I've noticed the same behaviour in many similar cases.

Is publishing the exact same content across dozens of domains a practice that is not shunned by Google anymore?

[tedster]

This might be slipping by the current algo settings, but I doubt that Google would find it "acceptable". They've worked hard in the past to buid a net that can catch and filter out duplicate content from page 1 of the results.

Google's most recent major shuffle is just now settling in, and it may have opened up some holes in that "net" -- but I'll bet they get it repaired.

[MrSavage]

I can speak from experience, they will nuke them. It will happen. I had this "learning experience" the hard way.