The Value of Content - Part 6
Five and Six Penalty for Duplicate Content
If the structure is identical, but the content is considered reminiscent of past content you are still going to get a penalty from search engines. In other words the structure and linking scheme are the same for site 1 and 2. The content also seems to be very closely related.
This is a case where content writers will swap words by using a dictionary or thesaurus to avoid detection by search engines. The fact is in the eyes of Google this is duplicate content and it will be removed from the index and offered a lower page rank.
The sixth issue is when the structure is unique, but the content is duplicate. In this case the site content has been created by using information off of other sites and sources in a patch work that creates a new structure and linking scheme. Unfortunately this does get caught by Google and other search engines. The filtering system behind the duplicate content is so fine tuned that it is almost impossible to create non duplicate content when you use online resources to gather information. In order to stop your website from becoming a target you should also learn the reasons behind why search engines care about duplicate content.