Are duplicate sites bad?

As part of a marketing exercise, I need to have two identical sites sitting
at two different domain names. We will then measure the visitors at each
site to see which marketing efforts drive people to our websites more
effectively.

For example, we might have national-radiator-parts.com and
freds-radiator-parts.com. Both sites will be word-for-word identical in
every way.

Now, if Google spiders these two sites and discovers that they are just
exact copies of each other, is there some kind of penalty in the rankings?

--
TIA,
Gerry

Gerry wrote:

As part of a marketing exercise, I need to have two identical sites
sitting
at two different domain names. We will then measure the visitors at
each
site to see which marketing efforts drive people to our websites more
effectively.

For example, we might have national-radiator-parts.com and
freds-radiator-parts.com. Both sites will be word-for-word identical in

every way.

Now, if Google spiders these two sites and discovers that they are just

exact copies of each other, is there some kind of penalty in the
rankings?

You don't need two websites to measure results of two marketing campaign.
All you need is two different landing pages and then a way of tracking the
visitor down to the purchase event. You can use pretty much any affiliate
sales tracking software for that. You just set those tow pages as two
different affiliates. PHPAffiliate comes to mind if you need an open
source solution.

Otherwise, by setting up to identical sites you are giving one of them an
unfair advantage of receiving some organic search traffic whereas the
other site seen by SEs as a duplicate, will have to rely solely on its
marketing efforts. Over time, with enough search engine saturation, you
will get enough organic search traffic on one of your sites to skew
results of your research so much that you won't be able to tell heads from
tails.

--

Cheers,
Dmitri
http://www.1-script.com/download.php
Free Search Engine Scripts
-------------------------------------

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Thanks for your input Dimitri. I agree that two landing pages on the same
domain would work well, except that we are talking about asking people to
type URL's that they see in print advertising. Longer URL's are often
mistyped, or users forget the prefix or suffix of the address. That's why we
are looking at stand-alone domains (with very short URLs).

The new sites will be exact copies of another well-established site which
does show up well in Google indexes. That's the one that I do not want to
hurt. To properly test the two print-ads, Google should not be aware of the
new sites at all, so all traffic to them is strictly the results of our
advertising.

As an alternative, can I just put a "noindex nofollow" tag on the new sites
to keep them relatively invisible on the web?

--
Best Regards,
Gerry

"www.1-script.com" <info_at_1-script_dot_com (AT) foo (DOT) com> wrote

Gerry wrote:




As part of a marketing exercise, I need to have two identical sites
sitting
at two different domain names. We will then measure the visitors at
each
site to see which marketing efforts drive people to our websites more
effectively.

For example, we might have national-radiator-parts.com and
freds-radiator-parts.com. Both sites will be word-for-word identical in

every way.

Now, if Google spiders these two sites and discovers that they are just

exact copies of each other, is there some kind of penalty in the
rankings?

You don't need two websites to measure results of two marketing campaign.
All you need is two different landing pages and then a way of tracking the
visitor down to the purchase event. You can use pretty much any affiliate
sales tracking software for that. You just set those tow pages as two
different affiliates. PHPAffiliate comes to mind if you need an open
source solution.

Otherwise, by setting up to identical sites you are giving one of them an
unfair advantage of receiving some organic search traffic whereas the
other site seen by SEs as a duplicate, will have to rely solely on its
marketing efforts. Over time, with enough search engine saturation, you
will get enough organic search traffic on one of your sites to skew
results of your research so much that you won't be able to tell heads from
tails.

--

Cheers,
Dmitri
http://www.1-script.com/download.php
Free Search Engine Scripts
-------------------------------------


--
##-----------------------------------------------##
Article posted with Web Developer's USENET Archive
http://www.1-script.com/forums
Web and RSS gateway to your favorite newsgroup -
alt.internet.search-engines - 15639 messages and counting!
##-----------------------------------------------##

Gerry wrote:

I agree that two landing pages on the same
domain would work well, except that we are talking about asking people to
type URL's that they see in print advertising.

What about the two domains, but they each redirect to a third domain
that contains the real content? Would that work? e.g. freds-example.com
and national-example.com, and they both redirect to example.com.

Similarly, use subdomains and do the redirect. e.g. freds.example.com
and national.example.com.

RFM

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 13:20:35 -0400, "Gerry" <nospam (AT) andeggs (DOT) com> wrote:

As part of a marketing exercise, I need to have two identical sites sitting
at two different domain names. We will then measure the visitors at each
site to see which marketing efforts drive people to our websites more
effectively.

For example, we might have national-radiator-parts.com and
freds-radiator-parts.com. Both sites will be word-for-word identical in
every way.

Now, if Google spiders these two sites and discovers that they are just
exact copies of each other, is there some kind of penalty in the rankings?

Yup. One of the sites will survive, the other one won't.
To try to avoid this one site will need to be promoted by off-line
means only and not linked to at all from outside sources. You'd need
to protect it with a robots.txt that excluded every robot known to man
so it wouldn't get spidered. Much.

BB
--
www.kruse.co.uk/ seo (AT) kruse (DOT) demon.co.uk
Elvis does my SEO

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 14:58:54 -0400, "Gerry" <nospam (AT) andeggs (DOT) com> wrote:

Thanks for your input Dimitri. I agree that two landing pages on the same
domain would work well, except that we are talking about asking people to
type URL's that they see in print advertising. Longer URL's are often
mistyped, or users forget the prefix or suffix of the address. That's why we
are looking at stand-alone domains (with very short URLs).

The new sites will be exact copies of another well-established site which
does show up well in Google indexes. That's the one that I do not want to
hurt. To properly test the two print-ads, Google should not be aware of the
new sites at all, so all traffic to them is strictly the results of our
advertising.

As an alternative, can I just put a "noindex nofollow" tag on the new sites
to keep them relatively invisible on the web?

No, you'll need the robots.txt file.

BB
--
www.kruse.co.uk/ seo (AT) kruse (DOT) demon.co.uk
Elvis does my SEO