Duplicate Domain? Duplicate Content
Nine out of ten people begin their search for both goods and services through online search engines. Your business’ presence and visibility on search engines plays a significant role in reaching potential customers. Therefore, the more websites you have the better your chances of being found online are, right? Although, in theory, it sounds valid, having multiple domains for one business or similar businesses can actually hurt your business’ ranking, and overall business.
A successful website requires a great deal of time and effort in keeping the site up to date and fresh. Standards in web design and technology are constantly changing and advancing, sites quickly become out of date and require expensive and time consuming redesigning. If you have to multiply the expense and time across several domains, the cost of upkeep can quickly drain your budget. Along with website design’s, maintaining or improving your search engine position requires time and effort. Search engines reward sites that have fresh content around relevant keywords. Maintaining a site’s on-page content requires constant attention, for example posting blogs regularly. It would be more beneficial for ranking and site traffic to have one site that posts 25 new blogs a week than 5 sites publishing 5 new posts.
Although, to save time, effort and money, it may seem like a good idea to post the same content on each domain, 
search engines see duplicate content as poor user experience and penalize them. Sites that have duplicate content will appear lower in ranking in search engine results, which is the exact opposite of what you’re trying to achieve in the first place. You can avoid this penalty by creating unique and fresh content for all of your domains or focusing your time and resources into maintaining one high-quality site with relevant top notch content. Maybe your business has the resources to properly maintain more than one domain for your business with unique content, but if your goal for a high rank on search engines, you will be competing with yourself. Unless, your domains are very distinct business, chances are you will be using similar keywords for your multiple domains.
Having multiple domains for your business can also hurt your link building efforts. Search engine ranking takes many aspects into consideration, including inbound quality linking to your site. Inbound links or back links, are third-party web pages that link to a page on your site. You ranking is improved when your linking increases. Like blogging, it would be beneficial to improving your ranking to have 100 quality links to one site rather than 10 on 10 separate sites.
Beyond search engine ranking, having multiple domains can cause confusion for Google in other ways. Google frowns up listings on Google+ Local that have different names, but the same location, phone number and services. Using the same contact information for multiple domains, you are risking the chance that the Google+ system will read it as duplicates and merge your sites in the system. This could ultimately harm your ability to rank on Google.
Reaching and attracting new customer is the most important part in having a successful business. Consumers are attracted to business that they can trust. Having multiple domains for the same business can cause confusion for customer, and ultimately create a loss of trust. Dedicating yourself and your business to one website with update to date design, unique and relevant content, quality back links and that conveys trust and honesty, ultimately increasing your search engine ranking.