Duplicate Sites/Mirrors

    Duplicate sites or mirrors refer to websites that have different domain names, but exactly the same content. For example, if a one site sells insurance policies, it may opt to buy three other domain names, each handled by a different insurance agent, but their content is the same. Such is called the commercial reason behind creating duplicate sites.

    Another reason why duplicate sites may be necessary is to cater to differences in culture. There are sites that exist in more than one language, such as English and French, English and Japanese, and others. A perfect example of which according to Google Groups, is Wikipedia, which is translated into several languages.

    Some companies choose to create more than one site because it helps them rank better in search engine results pages. It is believed that sales will have a better chance of increasing because there is more than one way to enter a site.

    However, in some way search engines view duplicate sites as a means of creating spam. Because of this, even Google has mentioned some tools that can help detect duplicate sites.

    If you are considering making a move to boost your sales, or to improve your search engine rankings, you’d better look into other methods besides duplicating your pages. Remember that spiders and bots are constantly being upgraded, so they can detect redundancy and ignore sites that have duplicate content.