A public relations agency that I'm thinking about working with is offering to heavily promote an article about my website to several of the media sources in my industry. What they want me to do is duplicate my homepage at allthepieces.com and create a second home page at: allthepieces.net The .net address is what will be used in the article so that we can directly track the results of the article placements. Will that hurt my rankings?
Duplicate content is duplicate content is duplicate content ... isn't it? But why are the PR people asking you to go this route. Why on earth can't they just promote the daylights out of your existing site? Either they don't have a clue about SEO/SEM or there's something they're not telling you -- and whatever they choose to call it, I'm inclined to think that our own "bad hat" phrase is as good as any! Duncan
You dont get penalized for duplicate content you just get ignored. Whatever site google thinks had the content first tends not to change. The newer sites that appear to have copied the content just get ignored. There's no penalty. But i do agree with Duncan...Why cant they promote your current site? That doesnt make any sense to me.
Oh and here's a good example... one of my sites, dealeron.com is PR5 and gets great ranking for our keywords. A few months ago we needed to create an identical site (long story)...that second site is dealeronwebsites.com the orignal site never experienced any penalties: PR never dropped, rankings stayed the same, etc. And you'll see that google simply ignores the second site - it isnt even indexed!
yeah i think a site of mine got penalised from all the big 3 search engines for similar or empty pages. planning a rework now.
I have seen this mentioned but not sure I have seen a clear answer. Is duplicate content different than redirecting a domain to your site? I redirect several names to my site. Am I hurting myself? Wouldn't this be the same as redirecting common mis-spellings to your site, which I assume many sites do? ...Or like Barnes & Noble using bn.com and barnesandnoble.com? Thanks
I have seen some of the big companies buy the .net or .biz of their website and redirect it to their .com. Those are usually left blank and just redirect to the proper address. I think they do it so people find their site when they type the others by accident. I don't think they get penalized for it.
then how does this work when your posting copyright free content from article directories on your website. You get banned for that too, or a serious spankin?
Neither. The duplicate content filter simply discounts one of two identical pages so that one will be returned for SE queries and the other one will not (because it isn't indexed).