SEO - Multiple domains and similar websites - Is Google okay with this?

[Lemia]

A client of mine has multiple websites for his company (there are four that i know about so far). Each website looks slightly different but has exactly the same content. The content is displayed differently and each site has different navigation.

We are now rebuilding his website but he insists on keeping the other four. this will just be a fifth website.

He has an SEO company that is advising him to do this to keep his rankings on Google high. Is this really OK by google? Will they ever figure this out?

Is there a way to have multiple domains pointing to one website and have each of those domains come up in google search or are these SEO experts right?

[Shane Joel]

I think you may get punished in rankings for multiple websites with the exact same content. The algorithms look for this. I own 2 websites, and remember reading this while doing seo for my own sites several months ago.

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