Forum Moderators: phranque
I am new here. I want to know about mirror sites & their harms.
suppose we have websites like ....
abc.com
abc.net
abcuk.com
abc.co.uk
All are with same content same design, everything will its an example of mirror websites?
Thanks!
"Mirror website" typically refers to something completely different. Originally, this comes from FTP mirrors, but since FTP isn't much used today, it also refers to web sites.
The term refers typically to sites that distribute software or other kinds of files - quite commonly, open-source software. Often, these are non-profit or volunteer sites, and at some point if what they are distributing becomes popular, demand exceeds capacity. So, they find other volunteers to "mirror" the material on a separate server. Mirror sites might be run by a university, a benevolent corporation, etc.
Sorry for the pedantic English lesson, but if you use the wrong terminology, it's going to confuse people, and you aren't going to get your answer. :)
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Now, I assume you are talking about "duplicate content", and it's effect on search-engine rankings. Having multiple sites with the same content will hurt your ranking with most search engines. If for some reason, you want to have duplicate sites with the same material, the way to handle it depends on your purpose in having the multiple sites.
If you have extra domain names in an attempt to get additional "type-in" traffic, make the extra domain names redirect to your "main" site using a 301 redirect. Search engines will not penalize you in this case, and will index only your main site - not the duplicates.
If the purpose of the duplicates is for load-balancing (such as in the case of real "mirror sites" as described above) you should have a robots.txt on the duplicate sites telling search engines NOT to index the duplicates. This will avoid the duplicate-content penalty.
There are some tricky issues with sites that operate in multiple countries and want to be indexed by search engines that have a geographic specialization. Normally, these sites wouldn't have completely duplicate content, but still might have quite a bit. I'd imagine there are those here who know how to deal with this tricky problem.
