How to avoid mirror site penalty

We operate under three store names, but want one site

[JaedensTwin]

I work for a retail store that operates physical stores under two different company names (based off of region), we'll call them Brick & Mortar.

In 1999 we started a third company, we'll call this one 'web'. We started this third company to avoid having to charge sales tax in all the states we had physical stores in.

Now we have this big disconnect. People in our physical stores, even our own tellers, haven't got a clue what our webstores name is. However, on the internet, and in Google, we already have a presense under the 'web' store name.

We are thinking of breaking down the walls between the web and physical stores, operating websites under the 'brick' and 'mortar' names, and possibly getting rid of 'web'. However we already have traffic from 'web' that we don't want to lose. If we operate essentially the same webstore under all three names, 'brick', 'mortar' and 'web', I don't want to be penalized for operating mirror sites.

Is there any way around this? Anyone got any good ideas?

Jaeden

[andreasfriedrich]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com] Jaeden.

I believe you need to decide on one single domain that you want to promote and use in directories and inbound links to your site.

Let the other two stick around and put a robots.txt file into the root directory forbidding access to those sites.

User-agent: * 
Disallow: /

This forbids all robots to access URLs starting with /, i.e. all URLs on your site.

Andreas

[ciml]

I agree with Andreas, but another method might be to put small, useful sites at the brick domain and the mortar domain. These could then feed the 'web' domain, acting in a similar way to affiliates.