I have been wondering about this for some time. Let's say I have a domain called mishre.com, would it be a good idea to buy the .net, .org, .info and any other available TLDs with the name "mishre" and point it to the same site and get them indexed in Google or any other search engine? Will Google not penalise the site for duplicate content even though the domains are owned by the same person? I saw a competitor doing exactly this. They bought every single TLD which has their site name (or minor variation, such as with "-") and get the domain indexed in Google, with no penalties whatsoever. Is this a valid SEO technique to rank well in SERPs and gain traffic?
Yes, as long as you do a 301 redirect, Google will not consider it duplicate content, since it is simply redirecting to your primary domain.
There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. Sites with duplicate content just have a little harder time ranking than sites with the same original content since the sites with duplicate content get scored lower on content-based ranking factors. But you can easily compensate for this by doing a better job with other ranking factors like inbound links. Duplicate content frequently outranks original content AND can show up on page one... even at position one. A penalty implies that Google has made it impossible for you URL to rank on page 1. They have varying degrees of penalties. You may have heard of -30, -60, -350, -950 penalties.... They get their names because people have seen patterns when URLs that previously ranked on page 1 suddenly when under penalty are prevented from ranking any better than page 4, 7, 36, 95, respectively. It's ok to buy up the other TLDs for your domain name if you want to prevent someone to capitalizing on your domain's popularity should it become famous. But unless you're throwing up separate sites each with unique content, I would STRONGLY suggest that you NOT point those alternate TLD domains to your main domain. By pointing those alternate TLD domains to your main domain you gain nothing. All you do is risk Google problems because of duplicate content. You will have no way for a given URL to know which version of the page (example.com/page.html, example.org/page.html, example.net/page.html, etc.) is considered the original. The .com version might be the original for URL1. The .org version might get deemed the original for URL2. The .net version might be deemed the original for URL3... and so on. So you have no way of knowing which one you should build links to. If you do insist on making the alternate domains live then I would highly recommend that you create wildcard 301 redirects from all of the alternate TLD domains to the .com domain so that in the event that someone browses to an alternate version (or better yet links to it) they will be forwarded to the same URL on the main domain. In the case of inbound links, the 301 redirect will transfer credit for all inbound links to the alternate domain URLs to the equivalent URL on the main domain. But again, I would simply buy the alternate TLD domains and NOT bother hosting them... leave them dormant.
If you have domains that redirect to another site, you cannot really submit it to Search Engines - they accept sites with content. They will not show in their search a site that redirects to another one, what's the point? So those links or 301 redirects will have no value.
Hmm...the competitor I am talking about is not using 301 Redirect....their domains literally uses the same site content. For example, if their domain is thisdomain.com/link1.php, then the other TLDs will also share the same format, i.e. thisdomain.net/link1.php, thisdomain.info/link1.php and thisdomain.org/link1.php with exactly the same content. No variations whatsoever. And yes, all these variations ARE indexed in Google, which truly puzzles me.
You are correct vctech. If you point multiple domains to the same root folder on a web server, all of those domains can be indexed. But it leads to confusion at Google w/ which version of a URL is the original... (see my post above) Your competitor is not too smart. You're better off owning those other domains but doing nothing with them. Just use your main domain so their is no confusion over duplication of content.
Thanks Canonical, I suspected as much....I'd probably do as you suggest and just snap up domains related to my site.
if google deems it as bringing value for visitors,then the sites will rank well,regardless of how many times that content is repeated. I have seen affiliate sites of amazon ranking highly on google for exactly the same content.