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Thank you Robert! Let me take try your suggestions and then I will report back.

Hi Robert,

I appreciate you getting involved! According to our SEO provider this tactic is a major part of their strategy and reason for the success of the site. I asked them to disable them and then they said for sure we would see "major damage to our domain authority".

The other issue is that they actually don't spend any time on these sites. They haven't been updated or touched in 7 months. The blog posts and single "unique" paragraph per site has remained the same. In fact, blog posts are exactly the same on all sites, basically scraped. However, they bill us for these sites because they are supposedly required for our SEO success.

My challenge has been trying to question their strategy when I am not an expert and they are supposed to be. Yes, they speak as if this tactic is unicorn dust.

Sorry, I just re-read my response. I wasn't trying to be condescending with the first line. I was actually trying to clarify who initiated the tactic. Thanks!

SEJunkie,

To clarify, the SEO provider did this. But, yes, 100+ direct match urls, all on different C block ip's, but mostly the same content. Navigational links from these site link to sections of our main site. Ex. "Electronics" on satellite site links to "Electronics" on our main site.

There is a paragraph on each homepage below the fold that describes that is unique for each page, but that is the only differing piece of content. The rest of the content is exactly the same including the blog posts.

Oleg,

So what's best course of action? Building strong content for each of these sites (100+) would be an enormous task, but disabling would kill the number of linking domains, which I assume would lower our DA in a hurry.

We actually didn't ask or want the sites developed because we don't have the resources to develop content for so many sites. The SEO insisted and put the sites up for "free" as part of their strategy. Yet, they haven't developed any new content for these sites in over 7 months.

Seems like it was a mistake from the beginning to do this.

Thanks, 
Eric

This related to a previous question I had about satellite sites. I questioned the white-hativity of their strategy. Basically to increase the number of linking C blocks they created 100+ websites on different C blocks that link back to our main domain. The issue I see is that-

1. the sites are 98% exactly the same in appearance and content. Only small paragraph is different on the homepage.
2. the sites only have outbound links to our main domain, no in-bound links

Is this a legit? I am not an SEO expert, but have receive awesome advice here. So thank you in advance!

Hi Jesse,

I checked our WMT account and we seem to be fine at the moment. I raised the concern about the duplicate content sites with the SEO. However, they defended their strategy, saying that because the urls are all on different c blocks, it isn't an issue. Also, said we would negatively impact our DA.

I agree that it would hurt our DA because these duplicate domains represent the bulk of our linking domains. IMO this is going to catch up to us. My understanding is the only safe value of these other sits is if the content on the other sites is unique and valuable. Not to mention there are not links from any other site to the duplicate sites, only outbound links to our main site.

Can you shed some light on this tactic?

Thanks for the validation and advice! It seems blatantly clear we should fire the provider, but to be understand, they should have known better, correct? It is one thing to pay for services and it not work, but to be charged for services that could harm your business, is really unfortunate.

Again thank you for the input.

Our SEO provider created a bunch of "unique url" websites that have direct match domain names. The content is pretty much the same for over 130 websites (city name is different) that link directly to our main site. For me this was a huge red flag, but when I questioned them and they said it was fine. We haven't seen a drop in traffic, but concerned that Google just hasn't gotten to us. DA for each of these sites are 1 after several months.

Should we be worried? I think yes, but I am an SEO newbie.

This makes perfect sense and also answers my question. I think your last paragraph summed it up perfectly.

Thank you, Mike!