Effect of Mirror Site

Will this loose search ranking?

[KenS]

Sorry for a very basic question.

If somebody in another country mirrors my site - an exact copy no changes, just a different url - will or could this get my original site penalised. Two identical sites might look odd to Google.

I'm not sure if a mirror could increase or decrease traffic.

Thanks.

[nanotopia]

Yes, you will probably be penalized when they discover it.

[g1smd]

Bad news. One site will get wiped out.

Google chooses which one.

[digitalv]

Set up a robots.txt on the mirror telling all spiders not to index it.

[g1smd]

Then submit the URL of that robots.txt file to the Google URL console to make sure that they really got the message.

[KenS]

Thanks for the info. Just to check ....

If the mirror is located at:

[asight.something.org...]

(this is the actual .format and directory format)

then robots.txt should be:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /asight.something.org/mirror/mysite/

I have checked the format of the file with a validator, so I just need to check my interpretation.

Thanks.

[g1smd]

The robots.txt file should be:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /mirror/mysite/

and the robots.txt file should be uploaded to:

http://asight.something.org/robots.txt

[KenS]

Thanks again - glad I asked!

[moftary]

A question in mind which I think nobody has an answer for. What about if the mirror site is out of my hand? Someone mirrors my website as is (not scraper). Should I in this case put a hand below my cheek and wait for google to choose which site to wipe out?