Have had several discussions with one of our clients recently about the pros and cons of running more than one website in order to increase their online presence.

We have seen several competitors essentially creating multiple "me-too" websites that all link back to the same SSL booking system - one company hosting over 20 sites all with different domains!

We are aware of the duplicate content issues however somewhere along the line in our discussion there has been a mention that Google may be penalising multiple sites that show the same contact details / registered office details.

This has obviously made our client a little nervous of creating another site - but be interested to hear if anyone else has heard of this.

What about the situation where there are multiple domains using redirects to point to one website with the relevant content? The reasons for doing this would include:

1) protection of different names used by the business

2) improved SEO from relevant keywords being in the domain name.

Is there any penalty for doing this? Presumably it is best to use 301 redirect so that is not seen as misleading.

Richard Morton

http://www.qm-consulting.co.uk/ 

On 16:18:58 14 October 2007 JonathanDavey wrote:

The search engines job is to find the best web pages that contain content on a specific topic requested by the viewer.

If they are then bombarded with information on 27 different subjects and a bunch of ad sense banners then this would be an issue.

If the viewer is provided with quality information on the subject that is balanced with other relevant information I don't see how the search engines would have an issue with this...

I have been advised that if people try and cheat the systems, they have the power to block all the domains owned by the party taking the mick... and that seems reasonable in my book.

But if someone produces quality resources with a dozen or so pages on a specific topic with contextual links to third party websites, then this should be celebrated.

They've tried it with wikipedia but then this allows those "aving a laugh" to contribute and the media is being devalued with the national "professional" media using various sites as sources of information without ensuring there accuracy!

If you build sites with a specific mission, just make sure you stick to that and not try and get every product the client does on every site... that would be annoying for the reader never mind the search engines.

There is no point in replicating content on multiple sites as it will essentially only score once... you've already mentioned this... go build a few and see how you get on...