Dot Com & Dot Net Clones

The affects of copying your .com site to another TLD.

[nzmatt]

I just came across a .com site which ranks well in Google (first page for main term) which has an exact .net copy.

The site is very nice and has PR5 home with PR 4 & 3 sub pages - for both .com and .net versions. It seems that the .net is ignored by Google in the SERPS, yet the .com does very well.

Is this advisable or worthwhile? I mean for this particular site the clone is doing no harm...

[Robert Charlton]

It's bad strategy.... As you point out, Google drops one of the sites, usually the one with the lower PageRank. The problem is, you can't always control which site gets dropped.

Additionally, assuming there are links to both sites, it's quite possible you might be splitting your inbound link votes. Would you rather have one site on page one, or two sites, one of which is somewhere back on page three and the other one invisible in the serps?

For more about dupe content, check the Hot Topics section, which is pinned to the top of the Google Search forum's index page. There are a couple of threads on dupe content that are worth reading.

[g1smd]

>> As you point out, Google drops one of the sites, usually the one with the lower PageRank. <<

In my experience it is worse than that. They drop pages on a page-by-page basis, and so the result is that a seemingly random selection of pages from each site appear in the SERPs.

The end result is still the same: split PR and poor ranking.

[nzmatt]

Yes, this was my understanding of it too.

But it’s a big site which is professionally managed, and as I said its doing well – been around for years but actually gaining recently…

I can’t understand why they would do this. If you own the .net why not just redirect it?

[Robert Charlton]

But it’s a big site which is professionally managed....

I can’t understand why they would do this. If you own the .net why not just redirect it?

Big sites can be the slowest to change things.

The IT or marketing departments of large companies can be huge impediments to fixing canonical and dupe problems. In many cases, what apparently suffices for IT can create big problems on Google. And some marketing people will argue that they want to see all their extra TLDs and vanity domains.

And even after you've gotten everybody on board, if a company or site is large enough, it can take a lot of time to change course, simply because of workflow or budgeting issues.