SEO question / suggestion
 

Hello friends,

Maybe someone of you can help me understand some seo thing...

I have the same website in two different domains:

domain1.com is in english language

domain2.com is in portuguese language and use the exactly same layout of the english one... only the meta tags changes, everything else is the same.

My question is: Will Google penalize my websites because they use the same content and layout?

Im asking this because my website domain1.com was getting a nice search engine traffic from a specific keyword and getting about 10K UV daily from google.com
My website domain2.com don't have much success, always had about 700 UV daily only from google.pt

Im asking this because this week, my website domain2.com got better results with the same keyword that I mentioned above, but only at google.pt and now have about 1500 UV daily.
BUT my main website domain1.com has dropped drastically from google with the same keyword, and I don't know what to do now... I lost about 80% of my revenue.

What should I do?
Im thinking in giving up of domain2.com website and move him to a subdomain like pt.domain1.com

What do you think of that?
Will this help me?
Or do you have any better suggestion for me?

Waiting for your reply/help guys.
And please, sorry for my poor english... hope you understand what I wrote.

Thanks!

I read somewhere that Google doesn't see two sites with the same content but in other language as same content. I think that you site was caught by penguin, try to look on your link profile.

Thank you for your reply RachelBlackG!

Can you tell me how can I see If my website was caught by penguin?

All who was caught lost almost all rankings. My site was recovered after two weeks. I'd bet that you were caught...

But how can I check If I was caught and where can I fix that?

You can't check it for sure. The only sight is drastical loss of ranking. Try video I post you. That's all I can recommend.

If the sites have high text based content then it is ok. Since the content is in two different languages, it wont be considered as duplicate. However if site is images based then we have got an issue.

Also a nice precaution would be to host both the domains on different IP (preferably different servers ) and try not to interlink them.

Thank you for your help guys!

Btw, can someone recommend me any SEO expert to help me in this issue?

Thanks!