Spammed Google by accident

Does a foreign country mirror site count as spam?

[Crush]

I have just had some sites indexed after the google update. These sites were not meant for google they were meant for foreign language SE's only, unfortunately they got picked up in the update and now I am worried that these mirror sites will get me a ban.

They are hosted on the same IP and have almost but not the same content as my mother site which does quite well on google. Some of the lower level apges are identical.

The problem is, these are not spam. They are the only way to get listed in local search engines who need a local domain suffix to list sites (eg mydomain.be or mydomain.co.uk). Now I am afraid Google will penalize us because they won't know the reason for the mirror site.

Does anyone else have experience of mirrors on foreign language domains?

[heini]

Hello Crush
just to clarify - those pages were translated to other languages? Or is it just a matter of different TLDs? Or - both?

[ciml]

Assuming for a moment that the content is not translated, but identical, I don't see the advantage of asking Google to spider it, other than getting past the 'regional' filters. Maybe it would make sense to ask Google not to index those addresses using /robots.txt

Google generally deals well with duplicates, IMO. Usually, it just keeps the best listing and merges the others into it. Sometimes, though, duplicates cause a major problem so I would try not to get into that position.

If the content is in different languages (so not identical content), then I don't see a problem.

[heini]

I'll second that - content in different languages is not duplicates. Only humans have the intelligence to recognize the duplication - which btw is perfectly legal.

Identical pages under different urls OTOH _can_ cause problems, I can testify to that.I'd avoid that by all means

[Crush]

I did not ask google to spider me, but it did. If I do robots txt, then I will not get spidered by local SE's.

The only problem is that in the foreign laguage versions you can change the language and it is redirected to my mother site in English with good listings that I do not want to damage. This is a mirror.

[ciml]

You can ban and allow robots by name. See the Web Server Administrator's Guide to the Robots Exclusion Protocol [robotstxt.org].

I'm not sure what you mean in the second sentence. Are there redirects or is the content mirrored?