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Each domain is showing it's own PR as below:
1 - PR 6/10
2 - PR 6/10
3 - PR (not yet ranked by Google)
4 - PR 6/10
Isn't this supposed to be frowned upon by Google?
Companies or private websites could have legitimate reasons for changing or adding domains. As long as they don't set up identical sites on separate servers, resolving to separate IP addresses, I don't think there is a problem.
For example, if you search for apple.com, or imac.com, they resolve to the same website. Apple purchased both domains in order to protect their registered trademark. In order to allow web users to find their site more easily, Apple has both domains resolve to the same website.
However, in this case, all 4 are showing in the search results...for the same keywords. Isn't that a problem?
That's a problem.
Report them as duplicate sites.
In my industry, we have a guy and his brother who own at least 16 sites, all inter-linked, all with nearly identical content. These guys have gone through the trouble of changing each page for each site just enough so that they don't get caught. Each site is an affiliate marketer, selling the same handful of products.
I reported them to Google last week, but so far no action has been taken.
It is frustrating because they are dominating many of the most important search terms, and their sites are filled with very little real content. What we have here is a case of webmasters who understand how the game is played... and so far have not been caught (well, one of the sites was already caught for hidden text or something and given a white-bar).
In your case, the 4 sites had completely identical content. This should be a slam-dunk case of SPAM, and once you report it, I would think that Google will take care of it (PR0 for all 4 sites). In my case, I'm not positive that Google will penalize these sites... we'll have to wait and see.
i understand that google recommends/approves of the 301 redirect.
domain 1 ---301---> domain 4
domain 2 ---301---> domain 4
domain 3 ---301---> domain 4
domain 4 ---------> domain 4
does the url of the site change to the same thing in each case? you say that it's the same.. but how much the same?
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the best way to have multiple domains point to one site is by pointing the DNS to the same server. In this way, 301 redirects are not needed.
The problem with this idea is the search engines may index the site under other than the domain you would prefer.
And, if this is truly identical content, I see nothing in the Google rules against mirror sites. No if it is a case like DVDBurning where they change the content enough to get by the filters, then it is a no-no. However, if these are truly identical the Google filters are out of whack if they are missing this.
But if these 4 sites had slight differences, or worse yet, crosslinks to each other... we're talkin' canned meat products.
If they are exactly the same, the dup filter should catch them. Now if they are playing games crosslinking to manipulate PR that is a different issue.
There are several sites in my area that required a manual spam submission to have any action taken on them.
In my case, they were exact duplicates optimized for different terms and cross linking.
Go's to show that even the Google algo needs a little human intervention every now and then!
If you set up multiple identical sites and cross link between them, then you are spamming and will
eventually get caught and PR Zero'ed by Google.
If you have multiple domain names all pointing to the same server, you are creating aliases not duplicate sites, and no internal linking is occuring, and no benefit is being derived, and google will leave you alone.
Also, the google algorithm realizes, that there are times when you need duplicate pages for legimate reasons, and will allow a threshold of duplicate pages without penalty.
Google will not penalize you if you are not 100% compliant with it's policy. As long as you keep an A average, you will do fine.
However, he is keeping his old site for now... he wants to see how they compare for bringing business.
Is this bad? The sites look totally different, have different URL's (obviously) and have somewhat different words. They are selling the same product from the same company.
Last note: There are no links between the sites. We both want them to be independant so we know how much traffic we draw on our own merits.
So true. The No1 mistake SME's make here in the UK is that they buy the .com and the .co.uk and point both to the site leaving Google to eliminate one of them. google always eliminates the .co.uk domain which then affects UK only searchs in the like of AOL!
My setup is a co-hosted server, but I'm not in cahrge of the domain registration and the DNS allocation.
I have a few IPs and hte domains are more or less assigned to subsequent IPs, a few each, temproally spread.
So I had the situation of having domain aliases on different IPs on the same server.
Further more since small parts of th epage kept changing, amazon style "you were here" and "others also liked" kind of links, Google didn't recognise exact copies.
The strange things was that Google PR0ed the second domain, but it still came up in SERPS, it was usually right below the primary domain but above others.
So often I'd have 4-6 results from te two domains for competitive keywords. sicne I've joined the SEO legue, I've of course turned to 301 redirects, and am waitign for hte next update to ssee them work.
It was still intriguing that the second domain was seemingly penalised yet still dominated MAJOR international 2 word searches above others.
SN
If you have identical content, Google will only display the most popular domain (by page rank).
If you have multiple IP addresses instead of having the mulitple domains resolving to one IP, then google will think that you are runnning multiple domains across servers and cross linking to spam the index. This can get you ban.
KillRoy, get your ISP system admin to use CNAMES instead of separate IP's, to resolve all your domain names to the same IP address.
If they refuse to do this, get another ISP, as this will cost you in the long run.
To summarize. Multiple domains resolving to same IP address on one server is OK. Google will pick domains with higest PR to display.
Multiple domains resolving to different IP addresses, or to IP addresses on different server
is bad. This will get you ban. Unless of course, each site has non-duplicate content.
Google Terms of Service, is unclear on this, and it would be nice if Google would expand on its definition of what is and what isn't duplicate content.
So if they look the same, have the same technology, powered by the same company, is it duplicate content? I should think no....it is simply a company opening up multiple sites to dominate different markets (note - they are my competitor, but I have no problem with seeing multiple sites as long as they are for different markets)
How does Google feel about this?
