Multiple domains, same content - BAD! Avoid the duplicate content filters…This post, I’ll direct my focus to multiple website domains—what’s good, what’s bad and what can really get you in trouble with the engines. As today’s online marketer attempts to stay ahead of the competition, he or she will commonly purchase multiple domains. Whereas this hasn’t presented an issue in the past, today’s search engines are ramped up and ready to bust you for duplicate, and sometimes even overly similar, content.

The driving impetus behind multiple domain possession is to hopefully appear in the search engines multiple times for competitive keywords by placing the same content on multiple domains. Unfortunately, this game-plan will get you in hot water with the engines. If you already own multiple domains, and you want to see a return on this investment, you need to have fully unique content on each domain.

Perhaps you maintain multiple domains in order to link them together in hopes of improving your link popularity. Unfortunately, this will also get you in trouble. Eventually the engines, and perhaps your competition, will discover your trick and you put yourself at risk to lose your rankings altogether. Search engines review the IP addresses and registrar information of domains as part of their review criteria, so it won’t be long before they see what you’ve been doing.

How Do I Avoid Trouble?

If you own more than one domain with the same design or content, you need to make some changes as soon as possible. If you purchased your from a company that allows you to register several domains with the same design, you fit into this category. With this model, when you make changes to one domain, those modifications are applied across all your domains, and you immediately end up with the problem of duplicate content.

Solution for the Outsourcer:

If you have a webmaster or hosting company that handles your website, they should be able to solve this problem for you. Ask them to apply a 301 permanent redirect to the main domain; this way, you won’t lose any traffic or visitors directed to you from other advertising means. A permanent redirect means you keep all your domains, and all past advertising will not be affected.

Solution for the Do-It-Yourself Marketer:

If you make changes to your website yourself, these solid resources will help you make the needed changes to your domains.

How to Redirect in ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, and Cold Fusion

Redirection with JavaScript or META tags

MSN’s Explanation of What to Do if Your Site Moves

Yahoo’s Explanation of How Their Crawler Handles a Redirect

Just like everything with search marketing, the basic principle here should be absolute honesty with the engines—no tricks, no gimmicks, just straight quality. Avoid duplicate content penalties and keep on track to high rankings by removing identical issues within multiple domains.

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