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I interpret this to mean if you have a) More than one domain name pointing at the same site (is this covered by "Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects."?) or b)Two or more sites set up with different names and more or less the same content.
I guess if the domain name is the same but with various suffixes that's OK.
Can anyone clarify this situation so a) I can avoid getting myself in trouble and b) So I can "alert" some of the competition!
Thanks
Chris
Yes.
As long as you use only one of them and don't submit the others this might not be a problem - a lot of companies "park" inactive domains so that they point to their home page. OTOH, if you submit them (as in "these are separate active sites",) then it's the same as this:
>> b)Two or more sites set up with different names and more or less the same content.
- which is spam if you do it and a copyright violation if somebody else does.
OTOH mirrors might be different (although this is 100% duplicate content) - try searching for a specific technical term eg. one from the Apache documentation - a lot of mirror sites comes up. The same goes for all the ODP clones of this world. So, some kinds of duplicate content might be "legit" - thatīs probably why the Terms are not quite clear on this.
I do think, however, that it's rather hard to prove that your specific case should be a legit one, so my best advice is to avoid it altogether unless you really have to... as in "no other options are the right thing to do" - i guess any kind of doubt will disfavour you.
/claus
As long as you use only one of them and don't submit the others this might not be a problem - a lot of companies "park" inactive domains so that they point to their home page. OTOH, if you submit them (as in "these are separate active sites",) then it's the same as this:
That's my experience too. But what happens if one of your competitors sets a link to one of those other domains *and* submits it to Google too? Google *will* spider it then, won't it? What happens then? In this case, there is no check that Google can do to find out if you wanted to spam or not. It is so perfect, as if you really wanted to spam.
And you can't tell the webmasters to take out those domains - see hp and hewlett-packard.
So probably Google has some extra criteria and not only the ones stated in the guidelines.
Do multiple domain /same content count as spamming?
Sometimes
- see hp and hewlett-packard.
federalexpress.com & fedex.com
coca-cola.com & coke.com
Google's human intervention [webmasterworld.com], it's all about getting people to the right places. Grow a company large enough so that the lazy public abbreviates/distorts your company name, and in my opinion you have a right to duplicate domains, trademarks, etc.
Grow a company large enough so that the lazy public abbreviates/distorts your company name, and in my opinion you have a right to duplicate domains, trademarks, etc.
Company size cannot be the ticket to SE tolerated domain duplication. It would only make the big bigger, while penalizing the small striving ones. That can't be a criterium endorsed by Google, or any other SE.
IMHO there must be some other hidden criteria that do a very good job at finding the real spam among all those tolerated coke's, hp's and fedex's of the world.
Or it's just bluff and there is really no such *automatic* tool and it all boils down to "human intelligence". In which case the answer to the question of this thread would be "yes, you can duplicate, but be prepared for problems when your competitors submit your duplicate domain to Google, set a link to it from a third page they are not affiliated with, file a spam report and a human operator takes you out of the index - you would then have to argue like those big companies, or have some other compelling arguments of your own".
Which is not satisfying either.
Bingo
site:fedex.com -uityrteyir
returns approx 16,000
site:federalexpress.com -uityrteyir
returns 1
That's without any robots.txt in place - so where is the duplicate content filter Not working here?
