Please let me know what is meant as mirror site?

[alok]

Hi,

I am new to this forum. I don’t know whether this place is correct for my query (moderator are free to shift it to proper place) or not.

I wanted to know about the mirror site. One of my friends has one domain name like abc.com, now he wants to book the domain names as abc.co.in, abc.com.au, abc.co.uk, abc.net etc. He wants to create basically the same site in all the domain names, but he is making a slight change in the content of each domain. Also he is hosting the sites in different places. So will all these sites fall into mirror sites category or not?

Which sites actually can be termed as mirror site? Please let me know.

Thanks :)

[Jochen]

If you look at some different definitions of the term mirror site (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3Amirror+site&btnG=Google+Search), you see that one returning element is that the mirror site is a direct copy of your main site. In this case the other sites contain different content, so none of them can be labeled a mirror site.

[alok]

Thanks Jochen,
The site contents are not so much different, graphics are also same, logos are also same. Then what we can say?

[Marcia]

Change it, make it unique.

[alok]

It means you are saying that these sites can come under mirror site?

[HowardMoon]

I have the same question as alok, and would be very grateful if anyone could clarify how this will work.

I am working with a new site, which will be run as both a .com and .co.uk. When a user goes to either mysite.com or mysite.co.uk, there will be GeoTargetting in place. A UK user who goes to the .com will be redirected to the .co.uk, and vice versa.

The link structures on both sites will be identical, e.g. mysite.co.uk/contact_us.html and mysite.com/contact_us.html.

Some pages will contain region-specific modifications, but others will be word-for-word identical in both versions (the only difference will possible be a region flag or some other text indicating which site is being viewed).

One additional point - the .com site will be hosted in Canada, but the .co.uk will be hosted in the UK. This latter point is designed to ensure that the .co.uk appears in 'Only from UK' searches on Google, MSN, etc. However I am concerned as to whether the geotargetting will effect that - I suppose I will need to ensure that mysite.co.uk can be spidered without being redirected to mysite.com if the robot has a US IP.

Any help would be much appreciated - do I need to take any special steps to ensure I am not penalised for running two near-identical sites under different domain names? If it is best to make both copies different for every page, how different is different enough?

Or to ask it a different way around - is it actually disadvantageous to divide my site in this way, such that should I consider avoiding doing so if possible? I am thinking for example that I will now need to generate twice as many inbound links, else they will have to be divided between the two sites and count only half as much to each.

Thanks