One website, two domains

Do I risk a duplicate content penalty

[GaryK]

Please pardon me if this is in the wrong forum. There were several forums that seemed appropriate for my question but I didn't want to cross-post.

I have one website but it serves two functions.

First it's my own personal website.

Second, a sub-folder contains a project I work on where people can download files.

The website currently uses mydomain.com. I'd like the section for my project to use a different domain name that's related to it so it's easier for people to remember.

How can I do this without risking a duplicate content penalty from search engines?

Thank you.

[Fleege]

I had no idea that there was such a thing as a duplicate content penalty. Thanks for letting me know. I was going to make two versions of a site/concept that I am working on. Hosted at different hosts and also using slightly different seo and sem tactics for them. Mainly to learn and test and for the sites to battle it out. (maybe to push the envelope on one and go strictly by the book on the other) So this is a no-no? makes sense but if someone could confirm along with answering original post of course. Sorry kinda new at this.

[tedster]

People use the word "penalty" rather loosely. What there is can more correctly be called a filter for substantially similar content. You can see why a search engine would not want to offer results that were essentially the same thing over and over - they'd be out of business pretty quick because no one would use them.

So there are complex algorithms to determine when similar pages should and should not be included in results. And those algos are still being tuned - but there's no true penalty afaik, just an algoritmic filter that decides which of many similar pages should be shown.

Gary, I'm not clear what the concern is in your case. You plan to serve pages that are related to one function from one domain, and serve the other (subfolder) function's content from the other. If there is some overlap, a page from one or the other domain should still show up as long as it isn't also duplicated elsewhere on the web.

If a different domain name makes good sense for your users, give it a go. If you prefer one domain over the other in the search results when the content is similar, then use robots.txt and robots meta tags to make your decision clear to the spiders - only let them have one version.

[GaryK]

Ted I appreciate your reply but I've run into this problem before and I would call it a penalty.

I accidentally left my development server open to the Internet while I had a website on it. The same exact content could be found on a production website with a different domain name.

Google dropped the production domain from the SERPs and it took me months to claw my way back into the rankings.

So, I'm still not sure what to do. My concern is this will all appear to be one website even though two domains will be pointing at it. It's just that one sub-folder will also be accessible via a separate domain name.

[edited by: tedster at 7:33 pm (utc) on May 20, 2005]

[tedster]

I didn't understand that one subfolder would be accessible via BOTH domain names. Still, search engines should show one or the other url for that content, just not both.

As another approach, can you change the links to that subfolder from the original site so that you really have two completely separate domains? If you have IBLs pointing to the old url, you can do a 301 redirect.