When we first started the idea of using the web to do mail order shoe repair, I made another domain called shoesrenewed.com - it has basically the same site setup as www.hoovershoerepair.com - with a lot of duplicate content. We did this because we thought the idea of a more national sounding company, rather than a local shoe repair shop would appeal to people searching for services on the web... but also needed to balance the need for an online representation of our shop for local people looking for our store. As you can only put so much information out there about a topic such as shoe repair, we decided to just make the sites basic duplicates of each other. Shortly thereafter I pretty much abandoned the second domain when I added new content to the HSR domain. So, it's still on the web, just not as polished, and not nearly as much content. This is actually a subdomain off of the hoovershoerepair domain on the server. My question is, does this duplicate content hurt me, would a redirect to hoovershoerepair's front page hurt me, or should I just delete the whole thing and put a parked page there? THanks!
dublicated content hurts you very very badly..google really doesnt like it, but I see you still have some of the PR..
Ok.. in all likelyhood it won't hurt you. If it does, then not in a major way. I would suggest removing the duplicates and 301 redirecting them to the main site. I see the main site is being crawled and is indexed fine. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:hoovershoerepair.com You have some supplemental listings, but that is cause U R 'link light' What about the subdomain? Is it indexed? I don't see it. Are either recieving search referrer traffic? ( I wouldn't imagine looking at the link profile) Let me know.... In the mean time... some reading on Duplicate Content SNIPPET: So let me know
hsrpete, I'm in a similar situation, our company name has a hyphen in it but we also have a domain name without the hypen (example: blue-widget.com & bluewidget.com). Both have the exact same content. The blue-widget.com site is setup as a domain forward. As of last month the non hyphened domain was indexed in Google then in this last update, Google started started giving the hypened .com love. I don't have any 301's set up so...I'm think about it now. Has really thrown off rankings. Duplicate content hasn't really hurt me, but Google switching between the 2 domains has.
Yup - that happens a lot... simply put 301s in place for a few months.. then simply remove the content and redirect the secondary domain at the registrar level..... If you read the entire article from above, there isn't as much a risk of penalization as simply making one of the sites/pages null and void so to speak. So you are getting no benefit, have a risk of devaluation and have to maintain 2 sites.... probably not an ideal situation, oui?