Duplication Penalty - Google and others

[andriegel]

Hi,

Let's say I have two sites: lawnmowers.com and lawnmower.com

If I built a site for lawnmowers.com and then just duplicated the entire site at lawnmower.com, am I risking a duplication blacklisting?
If so, how much different should they be to avoid the problem?

Thanks for your input!
-Andrew

 

[Kevin123]

Hi Andrew,

Regarless of domain name, duplicate content is a problem with Google.

It is difficult to say exactly how different the pages should be, because I see many pages that have similar, but not duplicate content, and are indexed. Additionally, Goodle constantly adjusts its algo and filters, so you never know what will happen tomorrow.

The bottom line is to make them “significantly” different; so, to your eyes, they simply do not look like duplicate pages.

Good luck.

 

[andriegel]

Thanks for your input, Kevin!
To clarify: is it a "visual" difference we need to make, or a "text" difference?

 

[Kodeking]

I would say a text difference. The crawler google uses probably doesnt look at images. I don't think a program can judge a site by its cover.

 

[AdoptableDomains]

There are several ways to handle using multiple domains on a single site.

Domain forwarding
Meta-refresh
Domain Parking
Duplicate domains
301 redirect (in .htaccess file)

The 301 redirect is my general favorite and probably most friendly with search engines. It also makes sure the domain seen in the browswer box stays consistent. Here's a site that explains:
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm

 

[Qwert]

Yeah just forward it, why have the exact same site on a different domain. Just redirect.

 

[andriegel]

The feed back is great- just to be sure I have this straight, it seems the best thing would be to do a 301 redirect from lawnmower.com to lawnowers.com and there is no spider penalty for duplications.

 

[Qwert]

I don't know about different redirects but I would say that redirection is the best way to go.

 

[AdoptableDomains]

The feed back is great- just to be sure I have this straight, it seems the best thing would be to do a 301 redirect from lawnmower.com to lawnowers.com and there is no spider penalty for duplications.

A 301 redirect basically tells the spider that the site has moved, and go to the new site. Therefore, the spider only indexes the site it redirects to, but supposedly corrects any incoming links to the redirect target site. If anyone links to the wrong one, the spider should correct it to point to only the one.

I was forced to do this when I had about 30 domains parked on my a site I manage. Googlebot and other spiders would try to index the same data on all 30 domains, using almost alll the shared server resources when it would index. After putting the 29 domains on 301 redirect, googlebot would then only visit once a day instead of 30 times. incoming links to subdirectories also all corrected in google to point to only the target domain.

 

[Mark]

It probably isn't as bad with just one Similar site - But I would suggest you change some content on the particular page you forward the other Domain to -

The main thing you want to avoid in "duplication" are the old type "DoorWay" pages (Setting up thousands of Duplicates- Ahh ... the Good Old Days - lol) ~ IMHO ~