Hi Everyone,
I am just wondering if anyone has some good resources or research articles that indicate penalties generated by Duplicate Content (Although Google always insist they don't penalize - rather they don't promote).

I can understand the issue of Duplicate Content in a sitation like the following:

www.example.com/index.php?articleID=1234
www.example.com/index.php?articleID=1234&type=new

Where the above url's show the same information or same page. This obviously is not good for SEO since a search engine cannot determine which page to index over the other. This also means that Google has to index 2 pages taking up more space in their database.

What I want to know is if 2 domain names have the same content.

http:// www. example. com (HTTP STATUS: 200 OK)
http:// www. anotherexample. com (HTTP STATUS: 200 OK)

(Spaces used to stop Vbulletin generating URL's).

Will this penalise both websites or only one? I have always believed that it will only penalise the second site since this is the copy and it should not affect the ranking of http:// www. example. com. The reason I believe this is because otherwise a competitor could deliberately sabotage your rankings by setting up duplicate domains.

Any advice / article links or first hand experience would be appreciated. Just trying to determine if I should recommend a change to one of our websites.

Cheers,

__________________
Adwords Qualified Individual | Search Engine Marketing Consultant | Web Analytics (Google) Expert | Web Designer (XHTML / CSS)

Datsun 240z 260z Club of Australia
Classic Japanese Cars

Splogs come to mind. People have claimed to have had splogs out rank them for their own content. I would guess there is probably some cases when ezine articles outrank the original site too but I would put both examples down to extreme cases. You could probably find threads within Webmasterworld with such examples.

I've never duplicated content across two domains before but I'm under the impression (from reading other sources) that it is good practice to link back to the original content from the 2nd site.

If I was in your shoes I would tend to lean towards having the content unique on both domains.

__________________

This is a little off topic but a very interesting video none the less.
Social Marketing: Success without SEO, Pay-Per-Click, or Affiliates


I hope its of some help.

A blatant attempt at spamming why do you even bother? I didn't even watch the video I just know its a spam post.

Unfortunately unique content on each domain isn't possible. There both branded sites and unfortunately showing the same data and information. Google has indexed both, but now that Google removed the supplemental results detail its impossible to tell which is taking higher priority in terms of search engine optimisation.|

My recommendation will be to 301 from the longer domain to the shorter one. The shorter one has had most of the marketing done to it in the past so it makes more sense. I don't even think users would notice.

I guess I'm just wondering if it will increase the ranking of the shorter domain name at all? Or more importantly if there was evidence that having mirrored content was bad for both domains not just one.

If not being able to have unique content on both domains I'd probably do a 301 myself but thats only from what you've mentioned and from what I've been reading around the web.
With Google there are probably too many factors involved to give a definite yes or no. I've never seen it in action so I couldn't say.
If it was bad for both domains it would be too easy to hijack a competitor. It probably does happen in extreme cases though.

Man its not my site, its not spam, it was a genuine attempt to help.

I'm fairly new to web development, I'm new to the forum.

So if any admins are reading this is not spam and I hope I don't get a bad rep.

So if an admin does look at the video then please come back and back me up.
Its a free 24min video, no email required etc.
Its a post I found in NamesPro. It discusses word count in pages and the fact that google will count a page as a duplicate one if the word count is the same or lower in a similar page on your site.

It also looks interestingly as disclaimers as possible cause for duplicate page counts and recommends making them an image and making the image a link to a disclaimer page.



Not the greatest way to introduce myself,lol.




I