duplicate content

[onelife]

Hi there,

I must confess to being a relative newbie to SEO and web design etc. But I would like to pose a question to you. But first let me explain my problem.

I hired a web designer to create me a directory www.thehealthzone.co.uk - fine, but then he said he could improve my visitors by created a couple of extra directories using the same content. Being a newbie no alarm bells here, so the extra directories where created. With every page having links to each site. 8,000 pages.

All was fine till I visited this site (WPW) and noticed a few issues with duplicate content, but the designers idea is too scrap the content on the duplicate directories and just have links back the original site for certain keywords.

I am of the opinion that this is just as bad.

What advice could you offer? Scrap all extra content, or is linking back that bad?

Many thanks in advance

[mj2043]

I don't think it is a good idea to have two or more directory with same content. It is very high chance some of them get duplicate content penalty and loss in SERP. I have two site, with almost same content one can't be seen at all.

[thedark]

with duplicate content google usually get sites penalized in ~60 days: 2 crawls - 2 dances. then you can get banned.

moreover it is not good you placed links between duplicate sites.

i read many stories about google banned sites for such things and have some live examples i can't share though. in theory such ban can get a domain name out of organic google search forever: they would not answer your requests to reconsider the ban.

your best ways to go is to kill this 'link farm like' structure - remove all the links between duplicate sites. then update content on all the sites but the main to let the sites have their own lives. after that you can put the links back, but try not to make it a link farm. you can use robots.txt to hide duplicate sites while updating.

[onelife]

Thanks for you quick reply.

I have instructed my designer to do the following

1. Delete all content in the extra directories
2. Put a disclaimer on their index pages to refer to original site for content.
3. Start removing links to extra sites

So now I have two 'ghost' towns with nothing in them, shame. But I shall have to use them for other purposes.

Many thanks again.

[Alshurf]

Just make 301 to avoid penalizing.