Mirrored Sites

How different must they be

[lgn]

I hear that having mirrored sites is a big no-no on Google.

I have two sites that are very close to being mirrored. The only difference is the price. Once is Canadian and the other is US. Otherwise the webpage is a template of each other.

So the sites are basically mirror of each other except for the case of 3 or 4 characters in the price.

We are rated #1 or #2 for most of our keywords on the Canadian site, however the US .com site is not
making onboard the screen with Google.

Does Google has a tolerance threshold to indicate what is considered mirroring.

Do I need to change 1%, 10% so the other website is not considered being mirrored.

[WebGuerrilla]

If your goal is to have both ranked, then the difference between the two needs to be significant.

If you are worried that a truly mirrored site might cause a penalty that gets both sites dropped, you don't have anything to worry about, Google will only show one of the two, but it won't penalize for exact duplication.

It's only when the pages are very close to being identical that you might run into probloms.

[lgn]

Yes they are going to be very close to each other, but not exact duplication, because the price field will be different.

If i put a robot exclusion tag in the site that is not showing up well anyways, should that do the trick.

I don't need both sites to be popular, just one.

[diggle]

Don't worry mate.
I know a guy who has about 12 mirror sites for the same business and he ranks number 1 for his search terms on google.com.
Sleep easy...

[Terry_Plank]

Responding to diggle: There are exceptions throughout the Web of Spam practices not being picked up by Google. But, if something alerts them to look at a domain with a human, mirror sites will certainly be something they notice.

I think that it is always a matter of weighing risks and making choices about strategies and my personal ethics. Personally, if traffic from Google or any other search engine is essential to my business plan, I wouldn't want to rely on a strategy that puts me completely at risk. I would make sure I had a back door, so if the strategy becomes problematic I'm not destroyed by it for a time.

To Ing: I'd be creative and find a way to make domains unique and managable at the same time.

[heini]

Ign, exluding robots form one of the sites should suffice.
Anyhow, as Terry says, why not build up the secondary site to hold some more unique content and have 2 high ranking sites instead of one?
Shouldn't take much, and if you are carefull with interlinking you should be fine.