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Lets say I currently own the mycompanyname.com domain. After some time, I found that it's very hard to rank at the top of the SERPs.

After searching, I find there is domain that matches one of my keywords.

I built the website in two language and I'm able to assign each language different URLs.

Will that impact with SEO? There will be a load of duplicated content between those domain (image video etc). I'm afraid one of my website will have marked as plagiarist because much of the content will be the same.

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If you duplicate content from any source, that will literally butcher your SEO rankings exponentially. Google and the other engines typically flag duplicate content as being from a content farm and immediately rank it accordingly.

Even if the content is yours, unfortunately today Google is not able to detect the difference.

Now if you're asking whether a domain with a keyword will help significantly with rankings - in the past that probably would be the case, but today content is king and the only significant benefit from the extra domain is likely having something easier for customers to type in.

If you really want the domain, I'd say you simply do a permanent redirect to your primary page and leave it at that because if you were to just move all the content to the new domain, Google would index all the content as brand new, causing it to lose the SEO ranks you already have.

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  • I give you credit for taking this one on lol
    – Anagio
    Mar 21, 2012 at 3:45
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It's unlikely to be a problem. Let me quote Google's content guidelines for multi-regional and multilingual sites:

Duplicate content and international sites

Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.

You may want to follow the advice given in the last sentence to use rel=canonical links with the hreflang attribute, so that Google can easily find the translated versions of your pages and show the appropriate links to users depending on their language preferences.

For example, let's say you had a page in English at http://www.example.com/page.html and a German version of it at http://www.beispiel.de/seite.html. Then, in the <head> section of the English page you can include the tag:

<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.beispiel.de/seite.html" hreflang="de" />

and on the German page you'd include the corresponding tag:

<link rel="alternate" href="http://www.example.com/page.html" hreflang="en" />

That way, Google will know that the pages belong together and are translations of the same content.

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