Mirror Domain Advice

[vangogh2]

My client has been operating mirror domains for a while now, and just recently appears to have incurred a penalty.

1. When I do a search for the client's brand name, a mirrored domain comes up now instead of the main domain.

(2. But if I do an explicit search for the domain (www.example.com), it does come up.)

3. The main domain is no longer positioning for anything

4. But the mirror domains are all doing fine.

It appears that somehow, they've gotten the main domain confused w one of the mirrors. So this is not so much a penalty that has been actively applied, perhaps, as just Google trying to filter out dup content. Except, somehow, Google has been smart enough to now only show the mirror sites - and not the main one. So, it could be argued they've just penalized the main domain, but not the mirrors.

Moving forward: Should I just do a 301 redirect on all the mirrored sites to the main one? Or would this further "associate" the site w the mirrors, and it is really better to 404 the mirrors?

One reason I don't want to do 404s is because they are still positioning on those mirrors, and the 404 would compromise any traffic they are getting from them.

Thanks for any advice/help you can offer!

[JohnW]

Yeah I would do 301s, make sure they work at the page level.

[vangogh2]

Thanks John.

This is a brand-new client of mine, so I am still trying to wrap my arms these issues. I have never endorsed black-hat techniques like mirrors, or experienced the fallout they can entail.

I need help figuring out what ultimately caused Google to suddenly have issues w the mirrors, when previously they had been "getting away" with it. Here are my theories:

1. Google's algorithm finally just put two-and-two together w the mirror spamming. The fact that I saw position drops in the week of Sept 15 from Google data centers w these IPs (74.125.47.147,7 4.125.47.104, 74.125.47.99, 74.125.47.103), a week before any of the site changes (mentioned below as other possible causes) were made supports this theory. This especially makes sense because Google is prone to test things out and show confusing fluctuations before propagating to all data centers.

OR: There are two possible changes made to the site that could have triggered it:

1. New IP address:
On Sept 25th the IP address of the domain name was changed to a unique IP. It had previously been sharing an IP with the mirror sites, so to be safe, we changed it to be unique.
NOTE: I had been seeing position drops well a week before the IP address was fiddled with, so this does indicate it wouldn't have much to do with the IP... unless this aggravated the situation

2. Keywords/Description Tag Duplication
On Sept 27 the admins were tweaking the CMS and mistakenly gave pages across the main domain duplicate keywords and description tags (but not titles). They also placed two keywords and description tags on each page.

This is something I was just made aware of yesterday - they have since reverted it back to the old status of unique tags.


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Anyway - I would really appreciate it if anyone in the forums could offer any advice and feedback on where to go from here. We are in a crisis mode and need all the help we can get.

In the meantime, the client does not want to 301 redirect the mirror domains because they are still positioning for terms (in place of the main domain). My fear is unless they 301, the main domain will continue to be found nowhere, and the mirrors may also eventually start to peter off the face of Google.

Thanks.

[JohnW]

>the client does not want to 301 redirect the mirror domains because they are still positioning for terms

It's totally crazy to not do the 301s. With some luck you may not miss too much traffic because the 301s will deliver it, and, as the 301s take hold and mirror pages drop out of the index hopefully the main pages will drop back in as this happens. If you let this slide it could get worse.

[vangogh2]

I agree 100%. But it was important to me to get as many 2nd opinions as possible to know we're truly making the best choice for moving forward.

Thanks.