similar content on different domain names

How do SEs pick up on sites that haev very similar but not identical conten

[space_bum]

One of the suggestions coming out of our company at the moment is to make a copy of our main sites, but also to edit the content of our sites (every page) slightly and establish what is in effect a duplicate site but on a separate domain name.

1. Is this a feasible way forward?
2. If so, how different does the copy have to be?
3. How easily do SEs pick up on this?

Anyone done this themselves or have pros and cons I can take to the powers that be?

Looking forward to some useful info

Dave

[agerhart]

Dave,

I would be cautious if/when you decide to go forward with this. If the search engines see the sites as too similiar than they will drop one of the sites.

If you are going to go ahead and create a duplicate site, there must be a 10% difference between the text for it to pass.

What is the purpose of the dupe site? Is it for SEO purposes?

[Ove]

Hello Agerhart

Similar content?

If you got a framed page
and you put the text from the other sites in the noframe area do you think they will drop that kind of a site its very similiar content in that case too and iam afraid of they do any comment?

(i know this is not right forum for the question)
/Ove

[agerhart]

Hello Ove,

This forum is fine for the question since it is part of the discussion.

Can you give me some more information about what you would be doing here? What it be only some content that would be copied from one site and put into the noframes area of another site? Am I getting this right?

[Ove]

Lets try again

If you got a page

www.mydomain.com this one is framed

www.mydomain.com/bla.html
if you copy the text from bla.html and paste it in to the noframe area.

www.mydomain.com/bla1.html
And here you do the same thing

www.mydomain.com/bla2.html
And here you do the same thing

My experiense of this will be that google will drop the index page and the directorie pages (bla.html) will be safe

/Ove

[agerhart]

Yes, I think that you are correct about Google dropping them. I mis-understood the orginial question.

Try changing the content that you are pasting into the noframes area, even if it is just a little bit.

[jonbach]

I find this topic interesting, maybe someone can answer the question that I have. Very similarly, I have multiple domains that I wish to have similar content on. What I plan to do is make three different websites, but give each a similar stucture and the same backend. IE, I sell computers, and the systems I advertise will be identical on each domain. Some of my text will likely also be identical, just because I'm not good at writing that stuff :) Because the sites only share this backend, do you think that is enough of a difference to keep the search engines happy?

[pete]

A great topic. It is always difficult to determine what each engine judges as duplication and therefore penalizable.

My 5 cents worth:

Altavista attempts to determine duplication by comparing the outgoing links from page to page.

Google have this to say: "Do not provide multiple copies of a page under different URLs Many sites
offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the
same content as the graphic-enriched version of the page. While Google
crawls these pages, duplicates are removed from our index."

In truth, I have found many duplicates in their index.

Inktomi seem to have the best system for weeding out duplicate content (IMHO). Difficult to quantify but I have often struggled to get similar pages into their index (about 70 - 80% of the same content).