2 Domains With The Same Content

[Nagani]

I have long been wondering how 2 domains with the same content, same template, hosted in the same IP is never punished by Google. They are .net and .com. Worst of all, there are around 40 words in the homepage main paragraph and they are copied from another site. Google is too nice to these two sites; they appear in Google SERP alternately like every 3 months, at the same position. In US Google, they are on first page, #6, in other regional Google they are mostly at the top. That keyword is fairly high; 8100 global monthly search.
Most of their inner pages are also not original, too. Panda update didn't seem to uncover those scrape content.
One of them is linked from a PR8 domain- contextual link, and Yahoo directory. Total links are 53.
Another is listed in DMOZ and total links 131.
There is no redirect in both of them. They are live anytime.
Can anybody give me an insight?

[aristotle]

they appear in Google SERP alternately like every 3 months, at the same position.

Do you mean that only one of them appears on the first page of the SERPs at any given time? If so, is this also true for variations of the targeted keyword or keyphrase?

[deadsea]

We are seeing something similar. Our main competitor owns about 20 domain names. Rather than redirect the extras to the main domain, they host them on the same ip address and all the content is available on any of the domains. For some mid tail search queries, they are showing up #1,#2,#3 in the serps on different domains.

Google used to have this problem solved. It looks like something changed in the google algorithm in the last year and this duplicate content is allowed to pop up to some degree.

I'm hoping Google gets around to fixing this, it isn't good user experience.

[Nagani]

Do you mean that only one of them appears on the first page of the SERPs at any given time? If so, is this also true for variations of the targeted keyword or keyphrase?

Yes, only one domain appears at any given time. I checked other keyword variations. It shows the same domain. The other domain is in hibernation for all keywords. But I copy some texts (around 15 words) of inner page and paste in Google, it shows the domain in hibernation only. The reason might be Google didn't index the copied content. There is no noindex,nocache tag in the page. I don't know if .htaccess can block some page not to index. There is no robots.txt in those sites. Obviously they do not seem to be familiar with SEO. All they do is to include the keyword in the title. That is all. That is a money keyword. Travel site.

[aristotle]

There are two different cases here, involving several different issues:

1. Scraped or stolen content.

2. Duplication of content on different domains.

3. Undeserved high ranking for sparse low-quality content.

[Nagani]

1. Scraped or stolen content.

2. Duplication of content on different domains.

3. Undeserved high ranking for sparse low-quality content.

4. Google picks one of them every 3 or 4 months to appear in SERP for the same keyword.

[aristotle]

It's hard to analyze cases that combine several problems. And these particular problems are apparently affecting a lot of websites, as discussions on other threads show. The only advice I can give is to work on improving your own sites and strengthening their rankings.

[caran1]

One of my first websites was a .com , but after some time the reseller I had used to register the domain did not allow me to change hosting or allow access to the control panel. I then registered the same .net domain with another registrar and started adding new content to the .net domain.
After some time, I got back control of the .com domain, and now I host both .com and .net on the same IP address. Both websites are listed in search engines and though the front page template is similar, most content differs.