cleaning up messy mirror domains

redirect mirror sites with a penalty

[Crush]

Way back when mirror domains worked and I thought I was not doing anything bad I made 3 copies on 3 domian names. It worked because the SE's in my home turf were and still are really primitive and keyword repetion will get you a whole page of your results. Lot's of referals! I am not so greedy these days and have 14 people working for me and I do not want to scew up their motgages by getting kicked off by the Google God who has blessed my company with being top of the pops in 7 languages.
So the skeletin in my cupboard is these domains in my home country which I am sure get me lots of customers. These domians have a penalty...rightly so, but they are a crappy design and I would do a lot better redirecting them to my newly designed site which is far more pleasing to the eye. The question is I am nuts even contemplating redirecting a site that has a pentalty?

[WebGuerrilla]

Yes, you are nuts. :)

If local engines are bringing you traffic, exclude Google from the mirrored sites and then just leave them alone.

[Crush]

I just realised that was my 13 post and I am a little superstitious, what was I thinking :)

How about uploading the new content onto the mirrors and robots.txt ( never dome that before). Is there anywhere where I can check that that robots.txt works properly? Is there any chance if this is done correctly of the bots still finding the mirror sites?

[nancyb]

Hi Crush,

Yes the bots can find the site if it is linked to by any other site - but if you disallow googlebot and perhaps the other biggies you will be ok. You can check your robots.txt with Brett's validator here [searchengineworld.com...]