pete - 8:41 am on Aug 17, 2000 (gmt 0)

Hi Webtamer,

I used mirror sites (identical copies) on domains when I started out. I got burnt really quickly and started down the long road of trying to determine where the line is for search engines to regard specific pages as sufficiently dissimilar and therefore not penalise.

Excite was apalling at working out the duplicates. We managed to get multiple listings for good search terms (taking up the top 7 in 10 which had good & bad points). Gave me some breathing space regarding traffic whilst I was getting wacked by the other engines for listing dup. domains.

Depending on the size of your site, one route is to use each domain as a customized gateway in. Focus on specific unique content for each to back up your primary key words. This may be to much work from a maintenance point of view. Certainly in our case,the investment has been well worth it. :)