2 Sites - Duplicate Title Tags - Loss of Rankings for 1

[SwipeTheMagnets]

Here's the situation:
SEO was done to optimize BuyWidgetsOnline.com. The owner of BuyWidgetsOnline.com decided to replicate that SEO onto another site BuyWidgetsToday.com.

So 2 Sites: Same design, layout and navigation

Duplicate title tags on both sites across the board, except the branding is different.
Example: Blue Widgets ¦ BuyWidgetsOnline.com
Example: Blue Widgets ¦ BuyWidgetsToday.com

The BuyWidgetsOnline.com homepage was #1 for "blue widgets" prior to replicating the SEO onto BuyWidgetsToday.com.

After replicating the previous SEO efforts onto the other site, BuyWidgetsOnline.com is now located on the 3rd page with the sitemap (BuyWidgetsOnline.com/sitemap) ranking, and BuyWidgetsToday.com is on the first page for the phrase "blue widgets".

I'm thinking a penalty of some kind. Any insight is very much appreciated. Thanks!

[Receptional Andy]

It makes no sense for a search engine to rank two identical, or even very similar pages. Only one can be of value to the user in most cases. Creating duplicates means that Google will choose which one is the one it will continue to display, and which ones it won't. The copies it chooses not to display will essentially be devalued and you will struggle to find them in search results. You will have no control over which duplicate is chosen, and this can mean the page you want to rank loses it's placements.

To rank two sites dependently, they need to be different enough not to be consider overly similar and thus subject to duplicate filtering.

[jd01]

At the expense of sounding 'abrupt', why would they do this?

Seriously, honestly why? When you find the answer to that question, which is probably (my best guess) to occupy the top two spots in the results and generate more traffic, the reason one (or both) sites probably don't rank as well as the one used to should be obvious... Because it's spam. Pure, blatant, unadulterated spam...

From a more technical POV Google uses a heuristic, not an algorithm... The difference is an algorithm looks for 2+2=4 and if it generates 10 results, will show the result '4' ten times. A heuristic looks for multiple possible answers, so it might generate the results: 4, 3, 5, 6, 2, 1, 7 and so on, with the difference in order between 3 and 5 being the clicks each result receives by visitors. If 3 is clicked more often than 5 within a result set then even though both are only one number off from 'correct' 3 will rank in the second position, and 5 in the third, because 3 is what more people are looking for...