I have two website with very simmilar content, www.mcnabs.com and www.homesinsouthernaz.com. They were used for two different geographical locations. Recently I have changed them so now they now are about the same location. Since I have done this I would like to shut one of them down. They both rank well with the search engines. If I keep mcnabs.com the way it is and have the traffic from homesinsouthernaz.com automatically forwarded to mcnabs.com will homesinsouthernaz.com loose its search engine rankings? WIll it help mcnabs.com? Is there more than one way to do this and which way is best?
Why shut one down? 2 listings on the first page for your main keywords is better then one. Consider one as a satellite site, getting leads (and links) for the main one. Especially since they BOTH rank well, I DEFINITELY wouldn't shut one down.
If you must keep just one site, consider redirection using javascript. If you set it up right, real human visitors will be automatically redirected to your "main" site, while the robots/spiders/crawlers wont be able to process the javascript and they wont get redirected. They will visit the "secondary" website as usual and you wont lose any rankings.
if both sites have same contents you better choose one. and if you love both and you think its worth it to maintain both you better give it a time to update one of the sites to make it different from the other
What would happen if I made both sites Identical and left them both up? Would the search engines penalize me for having two domains that have identical content.
More then likely, but why do that? Make them different and have great rankings for both. Don't redirect. If both already are getting good rankings, then just keep them both on the main page for your keywords. Just change the articles (or whatever) around so you can get by the duplicant content issues.
Either your 2 site will be banned or SERP will drop. Why would you do that if you could do some redirects?! Don't do some crazy. Look at these two sites to give you some basic idea on what I'm trying to say. www.snowpatrol.com www.snowpatrol.net Again, don't do crazy things by creating duplicate sites.
Right now the two sites are cosmetically different but have almost identical text. Both sites are about the same topic and having two different sites with different content would not be possible. If I were to go to the domain registrar and had one domain forworded to the other, would that be the best way to do this?
It is kind of disappointing to see people want to shut DOWN a site which is ranking well. Most people would want to get a site UP which is ranking well.
So you think it is better to have two identical sites. Others think that that will cause probalems with the search engines.
So if you doesn't experience yet any dropping your keywords or Your traffic. well just Continue SEO your site. Think Strategies on how to beat Them! lol Goodluck!
You obviously aren't listening to people that know what their talking about. Look at my posts. Read them and understand what I'm suggesting you to do. Having 2 sites that are identical is bad, yes, but what you need to do is spend the minimal time that it takes and change the text on one of the sites. Having 2 sites ranking well in the search engines is better then one. The more top ten positions you can secure with multiple sites, the more traffic you'll be getting to all your sites. To answer redirecting questions, it's a bad idea. Redirection should only be used if you're switching domains. You're not. You have 2 sites that rank well, so keep it that way and make the text a little different on one of the sites. Have someone re-write the content.