Referring domain issues

[LJHopkins]

Our website (blahblah).org has 32 other domains pointing to it all from the same I.P address. These domains including the one in question, were all purchased by the website owner, who has inadvertently created duplicate content and on most of these domains. Some of these referring domains have 301's, some don't - but it appears they have all been de-indexed by Google.

I'm somewhat out of my depth here (most of what I've said above has come from an agency who said we should address this before being slapped by Google). However I need to explain to my line manage the actual issues in more detail and the repercussions - any anyone please offer advice please?

I'm happy to use the agency, or another - but would like some second opinions if possible?

[LJHopkins]

Yesterday I discovered another 200 live domains, some which are a replica of the main site, most which redirect with a 301.

Should I take most of the domains offline - Google will surely think we're guilty of scraping the main website and creating spammy links to it?

[Carson-Ward]

Good answers here - did you get this taken care of? I'd say choose one domain and redirect or forward the others that have the same stuff. To explain it to my boss, I'd say.

• It confuses customers to have the same content on two domains. They might not know which company they're dealing with.
• You probably don't want half the traffic going to one site and half going to the other, especially if their content and user intent is similar. Every live domain is another analytics profiles I have to check on and watch for issues.
• Don't expect any ranking bonus from multiple domains, because when content is duplicate Google will just choose 1 page to rank.
• Maintaining multiple sites is more work than it's worth. We can get more done by focusing on our core domain unless there's a strong case for creating a new brand. (I wouldn't create a new site unless it was for a distinct brand).

Again, probably want to 301 redirect to the primary/canonical domain. If the domains have no links and no traffic (as I'd expect) forwarding through the registrar is fine, too.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Are you able to check the traffic through organic search on the other 2-3 sites that you're talking about? If traffic there is very high (which I doubt) than you would have to think carefully about this. Otherwise if traffic is very low than I would check if you could redirect that to the most important domain in the inventory.

[LJHopkins]

What a good point: The website/domain owner could have simply purchased the domains, she didn't have to put them online.

Having researched the issue more I can see that she has two or more domains (different URL's), with exactly the same content. In other words 2,3 or more websites are almost exact replicas of each other, with links going to the 'mother' website. What should I do and what are the repercussions?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Do the other 31 domains need to be online? Otherwise I would say make sure that you redirect and de-index these domains as soon as possible yourself as they'll definitely can have an impact on the authority of the one that you would like to rank.

[paints-n-design]

just to be sure - that all the domains "seem to be de-indexed" includes the one in question?

32 Redirects shouldn't be a problem. The domains with 301 couldn't be indexed - they are pointing to another location. Thats the same for 302, the question is the duplicate content. I have seen a lot of sites with duplicate content (means here really everything, content, style, etc.) and google just picked up one and indexed that one - not one other of the duplicates. One time it starts to de-index the indexed one and indexed another domain (thats another story) - I never saw 2 pages with the same content and style indexed at the same time in that case. The only problem should be, if you have duplicate content on a completly different site - different pages, different style, a.s.o. -> a "competitor" made by yourselfe. I never saw google de-indexing a site for that, but goggle ranked them lower and lower and lower.

If all pages are de-indexed I would guess there are more problems. If the one domain in question is still indexed, I would say thats how it should be.