Can I avoid dupe content by using robots.txt with multiple domains?

[dcabbar]

Hi all,

I have a website that promotes my business in 2 languages, and I have setup 2 domains for these 2 languages (w/ shorter domain names). To make things easier for me and google (and for some other reasons), I also setup a 3rd domain with subdirectories for each language. Basically, structure is as follows:

domain1.com -> points to all english content
domain2.com -> points to all german content
domain3.com/en/ -> has exactly same content as domain1.com
domain3.com/de/ -> has exactly same content as domain2.com

And, I placed robots.txt in domain1.com and domain2.com to exclude all content there (it has Disallow: /). Basically, I just want domain3.com to be indexed and get higher PR, but since domain1-2 have shorter names, I will give these to my customers.

Given that I am not having domain[1-2] indexed at all with robots file, do you think google will have issues with this structure? In other words, even though I don't want domain[1-2] to be indexed at all, do you think it will still think that this is duplicate content?

Thanks in advance.

[tedster]

You've planned well - this should have exactly the effect you want.

[Tonearm]

In the same vein, could I set up the content from example1.com in example2.com like:

example2.com/duplicated-content

and as long as I include a meta robots noindex tag on the duplicated pages, I won't end up in duplicate trouble with Google?

[tedster]

Right - and remember that translated content is NOT duplicate content. The character strings are completely different. I make that comment because some people think otherwise, and I wanted that fact noted in the thread for all readers.