Linking To Mirrors & Penalties?
 

For all the seo interested folks out there, what are your thoughts on linking to mirror'd freesites, could that be a be considered linking to spam?

I am a little biased as I don't mirror freesites, but if I was a search engine company and I saw copies of the same "freesites" mirror'd all over the place like they are, I would think spam.

Any one think linking to mirror'ing freesites could be dangerous to your domains from a linklist owners side? Or do you think it would be ok since everyone else does it? I mean... if it was considered bad practice by the se companies to build these mirrors and we linked to such sites, what would that say about our sites?

I'm not saying building mirror sites is bad. I'm just wondering what others think about linking to mirrors and how the se's might perceive that? Could that cause a LL to be penalized for linking to them?

Well I for one hope the search engines don't penalize for linking to mirrors since I both build them and list them on my link lists. Of course, I know NOTHING about search engines so I may be hurting my link lists instead of helping them. |huh

If they aren't, I would have to believe it's only a matter of time. These mirrors or doorways are creating a lot of dupe pages and I seriously doubt the se's will look at those duplicate or near dupe pages as quality content.

This is all assumptions and theories, but if we link to doorways or mirrors that the se's have tagged as not valuable we could be hurting our LL's in the listings. Hoping others will chip in on this??

It is my personal opinion that doorways and mirrors are not really helpful as a freesite builder or LL owner linking to them. Do you guys/gals think that model will ever change, maybe it's time? |couch|

If the sites were swapped around like text changed, images renamed for each mirror then surely it would make a difference?

The same problem with partner sites being all the same and seen as doorway pages for the same content, but if swapped around with added content they seem to do fairly well.

Penalized in what way? Lower PR? Not on the first page of results for certain search words/phrases? I know my new niche specific link list doesn't have a lot of sites listed but it has a PR3 after 5 months and if I read Awstats correctly 80% of my traffic is from Google (93% last month) and on Google's first page of results for several search words/phrases. Should I be concerned?

Google doesn't penalise for duplicate content, however they may arbitrarily decide which version to include in the serps and which to chuck in the supplemental. If you as a creator of mirrors want to have any input use the robots.txt file.

How do I use that? What is it?

I think you can be banned by LLs for using robots.txt to disallow SE to crawl freesites. Link list are giving recips not only for direct clicks on your warning page, but also to have inbound links. And if you put your freesite's warning page into robots.txt, all the LLs' links won't come into count. Maybe you're allowed to include gallery pages... i don't know.

Respectfully disagree. Google penalizes for duplicate content and it is one of the most serious problems nowadays. Even such things as feeds or print view can lower your site on several positions. There are hundreds of articles on this topic, try to use search engines, google's official help and google official blogs.

There is no way for me to know in what way a site might be penalized. No, I'm not saying you should be concerned. I would guess all LL's and Tgp's are most likely linking to some form of duplicate pages somewhere at some point. If there was a penalty of some kind for this scenario, I would have to assume it would be a very minor one. .02

Good point. I agree, even though they may be duplicate or near dupe pages it's probably not a good idea to disallow them to the search engines as some LL owners will not like it. One submitter doing that here and there isn't going to make a difference to the LL owner as we're linking to thousands of these pages like this already.

This is very interesting POV. I see your point with mirroring Free sites. They could be seen as redundant for SE's. One the other hand there are galleries that I submit to TGP's . I have a partner account with Elephant list. They do not accept other site recips on the gallery. so I have no choice but to mirror the site to get listed to other TGP's. Do I make 30 different galleries every day? I have changed my freesite submit list so I do not mirror them any more. So we will see how that works.On Freesites I'll submit only index.html ;)

Thanks Lowry

No, I don't think I would make 30 galleries every day as that's a ton of work. :) Making the mirrors of the galleries in itself isn't going to hurt anything on your end IMHO. The traffic that makes you money on those are most likely tgp traffic as opposed to se traffic right?

In this day and age, IMO it is much harder to get se traffic to pages with a small amount of text and low reputation. The competition grows by the minute and it's not going to lighten up anytime soon.

So, if you're not linking to your own mirrors from your other domains I wouldn't give it another thought. Keep doing what works. |thumb

Again, just my .02.

Ok thanks for the tip. Linking your other domains to the mirrors sound like a great idea. I was wondering what to do with the other 30 adult domains I have.

I didn't mean it that way. I personally wouldn't be linking my other domains to those mirrors. That's just me though, others might do that very thing.