Will multiple domains for the same local business hurt its rankings?

[Atomicx]

If I have a mold removal client who has domain1.com, which is several years old, and he creates a new domain2.com with the same info (reworded), but changes over the citations to domain2 will it

1. lower domain1.com's rankings?

2. make ranking either site harder since there are now 2 sites for the same thing?

3. reduce the ability for either site to gain a higher domain authority since links can now go to either

[tomwhite]

What is the purpose of the 2nd site?

The age of the domain a ranking factor, but one of many.

If he wants to change the domain your client can tell Google about a change of address in GWT and do a 301 redirect from the old site to the new site.

If the purpose is to have two sites ranking on the first page, a quicker and easier tactic would be to do some barnacle SEO (see http://moz.com/blog/barnacle-seo-whiteboard-friday) and get some of their citation / profile pages ranking on the 1st page for their mold related keywords.

With the recent updates and focus on quality it has become more difficult to try and operate multiple sub-niche sites, and will be much better to focus attention on creating one quality site which is seen as an authority.

[David-Kley]

Domain 1 had domain age, and the authority of the citation sites linking to it. Most likely Google had already crawled them, knew they existed, and will now have to recrawl and assign a new ranking. Be ready to wait a while.

This was very common at an SEO firm I used to work at, where they would create location or keyword-based domains in addition to the main branded domain in an effort to gain additional rank. They were frequently pummeled by the larger branded sites in rankings. Google targets these types of sites which have thin content, short term domain registrations, lack of citations/backlinks, etc etc.

If the site is hosted on the same ip address, in the same webmaster/analytics account AND has similar wording, I'm willing to bet Google will see them as similar and smack them both, or index the newer domain due to being seen as "fresher" content. Unless the time has been spent in giving both domains some love regarding citations and content I do not see this doing well in the SERP.

[EGOL]

Websites compete against each other one page in the SERPs vs one page in the SERPs.

Let's imagine that you expand this idea... if two websites are better then ten websites should be awesome.

So you build ten websites, each with ten pages and put them out in the SERPs to compete.  But your competitor puts those one hundred pages all on the same website.

Every time someone lands on that 100 page site they say.. "WOW this site has everything" and they tweet about it share it and link to it.  That big site is going to become really popular.

You have ten websites and when people land on them they say... "meh...  this site is OK but a am not tweentin' about it because that big site is a lot better":.

So, you can attack with ten slingshots or attack with one battleship, which one is going to defeat the competitor when you are fightin' one page in the SERPs vs one page in the SERPs?

All of my money is on the single big site with all of that awesome content.

The only time that I would consider making site #2 is when you have site #1 beating everybody everywhere.  Then what it is going to do is push your competitor down in the SERPs, but really instead of starting that second site you should just be expanding the big site into new keywords.