meta robots content

[Tonearm]

I have a very established ecommerce domain with great rankings. It covers a specific niche and I'm setting up a new domain that will include that niche and expand on it. I'd like to include all of the old domain's products and categories in the new domain, but I want to keep the old domain active because it is such a good producer. I may or may not forward the old domain to the new domain in the future.

If I put meta robots content="none" tags on all of the pages in the new domain that are brought over from the old domain, can I be sure I won't suffer any sort of penalty?

[tedster]

Yes - that robots meta tag would keep all your pages from showing in the Google index. So your established domain should not suffer from any issues - duplicate filtering, suspected spam footprint, nothing like that.

Note that googlebot willl need to spider those pages in order to read the meta tag. This is in contrast to using a robots.txt file, where a Disallow rule keeps googlebot from spending any effort spidering the pages.

[edited by: tedster at 6:26 am (utc) on July 14, 2008]

[Tonearm]

What about a human review? Could a Google employee see that I have the same stuff on both sites and trigger some kind of a manual penalty?

[tedster]

Not a concern whatsoever. I have several situations where content is duplicated across domains and every version but one is excluded from Google. There's no problem - and why should there be?

[g1smd]

If there was a manual review, they would likely make note that the web designer is someone with a clue.

[Tonearm]

Good news, thanks guys.