SEO Tycoon

**flix** · 08-11-2009, 11:57 AM

ve just come accross a secondary mirrored domain for the site of company I am working for, and just need confirmation that this potentially is having a negative impact on SEO before I tackle the guys who built the site.

For a while now, I've been puzzled why the site isn't performing as well as it should in google searches (given regular updates, quantity of quality backlinks, age of domain, niche nature of product etc), and I suspect this mirror might be playing a big detrimental effect, understanding that google penalises duplicate content.

In this case, example.com is mirrored by example-supplies.com, both sites look identical, and as soon as any update is made on the primary site example.com, the secondary example-supplies.com automatically mirrors this. When I search site:example-supplies.com in google, it appears as separate entity, and seems to have acquired it's own page ranking.

Does anyone have any thoughts why the site builders might have done this? The system they're using is .aspx , which I am unfamiliar with so maybe I've missed something. Am I right in thinking google doesn't look down kindly on mirrors of this nature? And that the split effect of these two domains is waste of link juice etc?

Finally, if as I suspect this might be costing us in terms of SEO, I will have to look into 301 redirecting the secondary domain so that only the primary domain generates traffic, any advice here? Would that mean losing the PR/places in search already gained by the secondary domain?

Redirecting the homepage should be straight forward enough, but would it ever be possible to do a whole scale redirect so that example-supplies.com/productcategory-productname.aspx is redierected to the relevant page on the primary domain?

**textbox** · 08-12-2009, 11:23 AM

Yes, duplicate content is a violation of Google's policy. You stated they are using .aspx file extensions which means it is hosted on a Windows server. There is an option in IIS to do a site 301 redirect. You could also do page by page if necessary. Bottom line is to get rid of the mirror site and redirect one to the other.

**edgray** · 08-12-2009, 12:55 PM

To be honest I don't actually think this will negatively effect the SEO of your site. I'm assuming your site has been in Google's index for much longer, Google values the age of sites.

This actually happened to someone I know. Their blog was duplicated in it's entirety. The purpose behind the duplicate it seems was just to get clicks on their Google Ads. I suppose it's a way of getting free content. That said, after extensive testing, we found that the duplicate site wasn't doing particularly well in the SERPs - it had definitely been indexed by Google, but certainly wasn't showing up as a competing site for the keywords the original site was targeting. In fact, it was barely ranking for it's name.

I would certainly try and deal with it though. Find out their host, contact them explaining the situation. Most hosts don't take to kindly to this kind of thing and should pull the plug.

**chrishirst** · 08-12-2009, 02:57 PM

How can it affect the optimising?????

Whatever you do on one will "optimise" the other site in exactly the same way way.

It may however have some impact on the MARKETING!!

**simituck** · 08-13-2009, 11:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

How can it affect the optimising?????

Whatever you do on one will "optimise" the other site in exactly the same way way.

It may however have some impact on the MARKETING!!

exactly, when u do duplicaiting, it is not part of SEO anymore, then it yields the counteractive effect.

**bogs** · 08-14-2009, 02:06 AM

well according to google webmaster central blog according to what google do about it:

Quote:

in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that'll befall webmasters is to see the "less desired" version of a page shown in our index.

**4u-domains** · 08-15-2009, 11:26 AM

i know some larger companies and IT staff will have a site copy for testing and to avoid any issues they will not allow search engines to view them.

**shakir** · 08-16-2009, 01:30 PM

Well.. once Google cache the site for the duplication and then degrading and very hard to come back in SERP.... will be ignored... after correcting it may be back after long time.... So if any face like this duplication issue better drop it and go for another