How does it work with google, because I saw similar things before - sites with the same design but slightly different copy?
I understand that in this case there should be a separate hosting package for each of those sites, multiple domains option probably wouldn’t work since all those sites’ IP will be the same (again, does google look at site’s ip?)
If all the domains are simply aliases and redirect to one single site, that might give good opportunities for marketing.
If the content is actually duplicated on each of the sites, that will harm your performance in search engines, because you will have 3 of your pages competing against each other, rather than ganging up and fighting your competitors’ pages.
Thats what i thought as well, but I see sites like this all over the place. Sites share same or very similar design but have different copies. Essentially google sees them as separate sites linked between each other. I suppose crosslinking between those sites is not much of importance for SEO here.
Maybe it’s domain names that google gives priority to when displaying search results?
If your client want to create multiple sites for same business then you can go for it. Even content is important and it must not be duplicate to get complete benefits from all sites. Design is not big matter, it may be same of many sites. IP also does not big matter because most of the websites are hosted on share server and due to this these all have same IP.
If you have different content for different websites, there will be no problem. I have few clients where we have multiple domain and different sites all are well listed. But one more thing i have observed , if you have same address in multiple sites it will hardly listed both on same page.
I think the best way to do this would be to buy separate hosting packages for each of those domains and make sure each of them has a unique ip address. The content should be different as well.