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Real Estate Websites - SEO Tip of the Day - Mirror Sites Get Banned!!

As I rack my brain to try to always come up with something helpful, and of true value that you don't have to be a technology wiz to get and implement - which is not as easy at you may think - it came to me that sometimes I think too far forward on these SEO tips of the day - and here is one that many times could be overlooked and could cause your website to be banned from the major search engines:

Avoid Mirror Sites!!! - Now to let you know what this means in case you are scratching your head.

Mirror sites are when you might for example have more than one domain name with identical content, and neither of the domain is forwarded to the other, they are both destination pages. The example I will use is:

www.oysterre.com --> this site forwards to www.oysterrealestate.com- but if oysterre.com did not forward and had the same webpages, then it would be a mirror site.

If the search engines find this out, or someone reports you to them (the more common way they discover it), then you can quickly get removed from their directories - good luck optimizing and marketing your website for the next 6 months at least if that happens.

Posted by Michael Thomas, Real Estate Website Optimization on 06/12/2007 04:54 PM

Comments (15)

real estate websites, website promotion, seo, sem, search engine optimization

Post is included in group: Fountain Hills Arizona Real Estate

15 Comments on Real Estate Websites - SEO Tip of the Day - Mirror Sites Get Banned!!

JUN

2007

Michael is I own AnnArbor-Houses.com and it points to my MissyCaulk.com site. So in the print ad's I use AnnArbor-Houses.com. Because.............

Are you saying I'm being penalized ?

I had a post here titled

Where Do You Blog?

which discusses my three different blogs. Someone brought up mirroring, and from what I can tell it won't hurt because it is a blog and not a website.... what is your opinion?

I'm giving up on all this SEO stuff. I'll write for both blogs and my website. If they publish me good. If not, I'll eventually quit. Or maybe no. I don't know.

Not at all - that's a forwarding site (or redirection) which is fine - I am talking about two identical destination sites - many people have them and don't realize it - so you should make sure all the domains you own are forwarded.

This is not something that will affect you until you really start getting good organic search engine results - because nobody will care - but once you have the good organic search engine results - you will see that people can get nasty and will do anything to get ahead - there is a lot of money in those top spots - that's why people hire me - because they get a heck of a lot more out of the top spots returns (ROI), than I charge - anyway...I jsut checked your domain (AnnArbor-Houses.com) and you are fine as it is only a forwarded domain.

Thanks Michael, I learn a lot from you. !

Blogs are not the same as your websites - they are websites, but I was referring to your company or agent websites being mirrored. And this would not apply to your blogs since they are unique content - even if you post your blog on your website - this would not be considered as a mirrored site.

thanks for the tip

Hey michale, nice to know, lucky me that I have not done that and I never thought to do that, but thanks for letting us know, great information, we appreciate it !

JUN

2007

I was just talking about this on another SEO post. Thanks for the information.

Having redirects are fine (some people might not like it too much) but should not affect your SEO. ANY duplicate content can be a hazard, even if it is a blog (same blog on separate sites is bad). As well, you should look out for duplicate content from plagiarism, especially if you start to really generate traffic. I was recommended a great free service to help locate ANY duplicate content on the net for you. Called CopyScape, they are a non-profit 'campaign' to stop internet plagiarism. Check them out even if you would like to find out if you are duplicating content!

JUN

2007

Great website info - thanks Michael

Once again great SEO info and website consulting for all us internet real estate users

SEP

2007

Great tip and importtant info to know. Thanks.

SEP

2007

Thanks for the tip Michael. I don't understand why someone would want to do that though. Seems like a waste of resources.

SEP

2007

I am currently optimising my company website and am wanting to buy a number of domains and point them to the home page.

The main website is www.gencia.co.uk. We offer a number of services such as email marketing, brand development etc

What I would like to do is have a number of domains pointing at the same home page but each would have different content, but the rest of the site would be the same and on the gencia domain.

So for example, I buy gencia-brand-development.co.uk and point it at the gencia.co.uk home page - if they come in via the brand development url some different h1 and h2 content are used and there'll be a few paragraphs on that area of expertise - the rest of the page will be the same, all the links will link off to the gencia.co.uk website

as they have different content, am hoping they won't be regarded as mirror sites - more like 10 different landing pages all linking back to our main website - would this be ok?

Regards,
David

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