Multiple Domains

[clickclick]

I have a cleint who has a webs site which he seems happy with, but hea has bought another 6 domain names and copied the data to each domain web space. The content is extreemly similar but not exactly the same, I mean it looks the same, but it isn't quite. My feeling is that this will be detremental to his site, if this is the case should he just alais up the domain names or keep them separate with one page of text and a javascript redirect on the page to the main site?

[WebGuerrilla]

If the client is not intending to try and use the duplicate sites to gain additional search engine positions, then the easiest thing to do would be to put up a robots.txt file on each site to prevent it from being indexed.

If the goal is to use them for additional positioning, then you might want to advise against it. At the moment it doesn't appear that Google is penalizing dupe sites, but it they have in the past.

If they all get indexed, only one will typically show up anyway, so it really isn't worth the risk.

[Robert Charlton]

Even if they all showed up, you would be shooting yourself in the foot with mirror sites in Google, because ultimately you'd be splitting your incoming links among several domains... splitting the vote, so to speak. Instead of reaching the critical mass of links on one domain and having that domain rank well, you might have several domains languishing on the back pages.

Assuming that you are getting some inbound links, the longer you leave the multiple domains up, the messier the whole linking situation is going to be to clean up.

You also run the risk of visitors running across the dupe content and being very annoyed.

[clickclick]

Thanks for your help, I dont know the reason why he has bought all of the names, other than to prevent other people using them. I'll follow your advice - thanks again