My little situation.

does adsense have anything to do with this?

[StuntasticAudi]

Webmaster has contacted me and he wants to purchase rights to my website..what i mean by that is he wants me to make him a copy of my site and change the graphics, colors, names, etc...but basically it will have the same content. He is willing to pay me good $$$ for this. He wants me to give him rights to the script so he can host this site himself and put his own google ads on there and other ads.

I dont want to give him full access just the .php files but it will connect to my database where all the content is. This way he wont be able to change anything. Now my question is do i have to worry about anything with Adsense. I have my ads on there and he wants to have his own adsense on his website. The domain name will be in his name. What do you guys thing?

[Emilio]

You may get penalized by Google for duplicate content. This may affect your adsense earnings depending on how much search engine traffic your site is currently getting.

[StuntasticAudi]

When you say penalized by google what do you mean? banned?

[driris]

I am not sure but i think adsense terms prohibits the showing of ads on duplicate pages.

[Lagamorph]

There's also the risk of getting dumped by the search engines isn't there?

[Lagamorph]

When you say penalized by google what do you mean? banned?

Just guessing but if they find the same content coming from one database with 2 publishers selling ads I could see that happening.

[StuntasticAudi]

Alright well i guess i will have to think about that..last thing i want to do is lose my own business.

[toomer]

Look in the Google search thread for more info about duplicate content penalty -- but here's the reason in a nutshell.

Let's say I run a website about widgets, and have the #1 spot in Google for it. Since Google only shows 10 results per page by default, I could just buy 9 more domain names, post duplicate copies of my content, and in time (theoretically) - they should crawl up to all the other spots. I could own the entire first page.

So ... content that is effectively a duplicate between two sites will end up being penalized, and I believe both suffer as a result.

[OptiRex]

So ... content that is effectively a duplicate between two sites will end up being penalized, and I believe both suffer as a result.

Yep, more or less correct however it is more likely that the original, therefore older site, will prevail and the copy will suffer the duplication penalty.

There is a way to have identical pages and not suffer however I am not going to reveal how to do it!

The question has to be why does this other person feel that they can earn money from your site that you are not currently doing?

Are they considering AdSense arbitrage?

[rj87uk]

Me? I wouldn't do it - not a chance.

You could just sell the website and make another with different content? But then the time, sandbox, money, marketing might all add up to what you sold for and then its pointless.

[Alioc]

My suggestion: If you're going to do it, prefer selling the site completely; no sharing. Get the money, contract and a permanent link from the main page of your "old" site to your new site for a year.