www.targetURL.com have a number of top Google rankings for the keyword phrase ‘[area] realestate’.
A link check reveals they have registered and setup 100’s of www.[area]-realestate.com domain names with 1 way links pointing back to www.targetURL.com/area/realestate.asp



Both sites are doing particularly well in the Google SERPs for searches on ‘area realestate’. It appears they have managed this by serving (as far as I can see) identical pages on ‘www.[area]-realestate’ domain and on ‘www.targetURL.com’

It seems this has enabled them to rank very well for that particular keyword phrase across all the geographical areas they have targeted with area-specific, keyword-focused domains. I was very interested to see how both ‘www.targetURL.com’ and the keyword heavy domain names managed to retain SERPs rankings when serving what appears to be duplicate content.



www.[area]-realestate.com Google’s index listing has no title or description; nothing other than the 'www.[area X]-realestate.com’ URL, not even a cache date is available.

Q: Can anyone tell me why Google only displays the URL, and no title or description in its search results?



‘www.targetURL.com’ ONLY links to other ‘www.targetURL.com’ sites covering adjacent areas.

'www.[area]-realestate.com’ links BOTH to ‘www.targetURL.com’ and other 'www.[area]-realestate.com’ domains in the adjacent areas.



I also noticed that 'www.[area]-realestate.com’s robots.txt file includes this invalid markup, any ideas what this actually does? I thought ‘Disallow: /’ was the correct command to actually disallow a bot:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: *

Q: Could this robots.txt be a bluff designed to cover the 'www.[area X]-realestate.com’ page against penalization by Google for duplicate content?


What I am struggling to understand is why they seem to have benefited in rankings due to duplicate content links from keyword rich domain links hosted on the same IP address and whether this is legitimate practice in order to gain rankings for target keywords. Should they be reported to Google Webspam?

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. :)

I'm surprised nobody else has commented on this - seems really interesting.

Have you discovered anything new? I wonder how we could test this out without buying a bunch of domains.

Could it be that Google is only crediting the inbound links into ‘www.[area]-realestate’.

The dissallow command in the robots.txt file only serves to restict GoogleBot from seeing the site content but the links into the domain remain valid, hence it enters the index but does not show page titles, meta descriptions or any content.

This URL is then redirected through to the target URL using a non-se friendly redirect. Otherwise the target URL would show in the index.

Have you tried a link:‘www.[area]-realestate’?
Have you checked how they are redirecting?

It is however an interesting tactic that I have also seen in PPC. Competitors have used new URL's for their sub-directories. ie.

www.example.com/productA = www.example-productA.com

to gain an increased presence in the paid listings.

The robots.txt is only in the 'disallow: *' format when referring to Googlebot, all the others display as 'disallow: / '.

I have run link:‘www.[area]-realestate’ and it seems most of their inbound links are from their other www.[area]-realestate domains. The rest of the inlinks come from directories (some quite bad ones too!) and one or two unrelated real estate agent's sites. There are also more domains registered by these guys in this format: www.arearealestate that link in too these www.[area]-realestate pages.

There are no redirects on the links, a quick WebBug check shows pages are served without redirect.