Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
One of my clients has registered multiple domains, all having exactly similiar content. Actually, an update on the corporate site is getting reflected on all the domains. All the domains were taken to target various keywords, but as the clinet does not wish to host the separate domains at separate servers, the domains have been configured in such a manner that any changes on the main corporate website, reflects in all the domains.
Few domains are ranking high in major search engines for different keywords.
Google has indexed a majority of the domains and shuffling them for the keywords almost on a weekly basis. According to SE guidelines, there is a chance of the domains getting blacklisted for dupe content issues, moreover the corporate site is losing its position for a majority of the targeted keywords.
How can we resolve this issue? A 301 permanent redirection at all the domains to the main corporate website, that too at page level?
Waiting for your suggestions....
To have multiple domains having very similar content on the same server [on the same c-block?] can be dangerous.
At the very best, Google will index one of the sites normally, and either ignore the others, or put them in the supplemental index.
At the worst, all sites could be penalised for duplicate content.
If your client can see the drop in rankings then it shouldn't be too difficult to persuade him/her to take the time to create unique content for each of the sites, or to consolidate the sites into one domain.
I'm afraid I can't see any other way around it. A 301 from all domains to the corporate site would render all sites apart from the corporate useless, and not worth having, surely?
So supposing the content was the same for both markets...surely Google wouldn't insist that you rewrote it all when its essentially the same info for both markets? That would seem illogical.
My guess would be that it would take the .com version for Google.com and take the .co.uk for the UK Google. On the assumption they were hosted in the relevant regions.
Problem is it means keeping multiple versions of the same site updated...forwarding would be more sensible in theory, but Google might penalise for this.
There must be a easier solution though surely?
[edited by: Simsi at 12:56 pm (utc) on July 13, 2006]
