Should I redirect my mirror sites?

what should I do with these sites I inherited?

[kittykatt]

My new client has 3 different urls on the same IP address and all are mirrored sites. Now she wants to buy another address with the keyword in the domain and mirror that one too.

One of the 3 sites is doing fairly well in the serps, but the other 2 are not even showing up. I'm not sure if they've officially been banned by Google - the pagerank bar is blank.

1. Should we buy the new keyword url and start promoting that? or should we stick with the url that has already been established, including the inbound links.

2. Should we redirect using a 301 redirect from the other mirrored sites or should we just leave them alone and stop promoting them altogether - taking a wait and see attitude?

Thanks!

[dazz]

Always dangerous having mirror sites with duplicate content, Google probably hasnt banned your other 2 sites but just excluded them from the index as it is duplicate content.

If I were you I would just concentrate on your main domain name and 301 your other domain names to your main site.

[kittykatt]

Good advice.

But how do the engines feel about 301 redirects? Are they viewed as spam too?

[Robert Charlton]

I would definitely avoid mirror sites. Some of the other engines aren't as clever as Google is about ignoring them, and they can lead to inbound link confusion as well.

You can see how I stumbled through the process of finding out how to redirect multiple domains most economically at:

Pointing multiple domain names to main site without mirrors
How to do this without hosting them separately and using 301s?
[webmasterworld.com...]

But how do the engines feel about 301 redirects? Are they viewed as spam too?

Note WebGuerrilla's warning about this on msg#17 and andreasfriedrich's suggestions on the thread. I've never had any trouble redirecting 2 or 3 domains with just 301s. I suspect, if there were a lot of domains, that 303s and or robots.txt exclusions, as discussed, would be wise.