15 Deferent Domains and One Site!!!

Hi everyone,

Few weeks ago, I started working with this company and while I was being introduced to their website, which ranks very good for most of their keywords, I notice that they have 15 deferent domains all of them resolve to the same website!

Here's how it's done, all of these sites are hosted on the same server and each one of them maps the same folder (website).
So if you type www.domain1.com you'll get the website and you navigate it with the base URL: www.domain1.com/, however; if you type www.domain2.com you'll get the same website too but you navigate it with the base URL: www.domain2.com/ and so on… AND this has been this way for more than two reays

Obviously, this's a dup content big time, isn’t it? My question is does Google really care about the dup content? and if so, why this site is not panelized?

Thank you all for your comments.

They do care. Using site searches in Google will show you the problem:

site:www.example.com
site:example.com -inurl:www

You will see that many results are being filtered.


The solution is a set of site-wide 301 redirects on the server, so that only the canonical domain is indexed. The redirects should each preserve the originally requested path and file information within that redirect.

Thank you g1smd for your reply, I know you've said this a lot of times because I read most of the posts in this forum, but I'm just wondering how all of these domains are still ranking very good in Google? not only the PR tool -in Firefox- shows a PR 5 for most of the pages on all of them, but also they show on the first page of Google search results for most of their related keywords!

Having said that, what deference would it really make if I set up these domains the way they should be (301 redirect)?

Well, Toolbar PR for the "one" would no doubt increase. Whether that has an effect on rankings and traffic is another matter.

The danger at present is that Google one day suddenly takes a dislike to your "network" and it sinks without trace overnight.

By the way, there is no real Duplicate Content Penalty, it is more a set of filters that tries to drop the additional URLs for a "page" from the results.

If you clean this up and establish ONE main URL that all others and nonwww redirect to with a 301 it is also important to clean up any links pointing to the secondary domains.

The company should decide what the main URL is and promote that only - it will become stronger over time. The other domains will act to look after typos and any stray offline promotion etc.

Having all these domains pointing to the one website can only have a diluting effect and although they show in the search results currently there is no telling when a slight algo change could knock the lot for a six...

By the way, there is no real Duplicate Content Penalty, it is more a set of filters that tries to drop the additional URLs for a "page" from the results.

g1smd, thank you for that info

excell, very well said but I have a question:

it is also important to clean up any links pointing to the secondary domains.

Will the 301 take care of that overtime?

The 301 redirect is a very good start, but over time, you should get people to update their links to point to the correct site.