multiple domains - same content

protecting trademarks

[jpavery]

Need opinions. Just took on a client whom has several domain names with their trade mark in them and all of them pointing to one site... or pages of same site. Some are indexed by google and others are not. When I questioned them about this the story goes like this:

for sake of argument - they are www.widgest.com and one of their products is "Blue" - if a reseller should launch a site and call it www.widgest-blue.com the company would ask for the site claiming trademark infringment - and it appears they were succesful - they have about 20! www.online-blue-widgets.com (you get the idea)

I would like to clean this up - any ideas on how I handle the client. The other thing that complicates this is various sites have marginal ranking (a couple on the second page) for various KWs... so it will be a tough sell to have them drop the sites.

And why has google allowed four domains with identical content (one is the main site and the other three point back to it)?

Help?

JP

[jpavery]

sorry - also wanted to mention they use multiple domains for campaing tracking.

[killroy]

the technically correct answer would be to 301 redirect to the main domain, but that would waste their rankingpotential.

so the good SEO answer would be to create a minisite for "blue" on www.blue-widgets.com and link to it from www.widgets.com. Jsut make sure it's noit TOO integrated (cross-linking) and it doesn't look liek a door way. Think micro site, liek a small, stand-alone summary for "blue"

SN