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I run a website that includes a blog which was hand-coded by myself and is hosted on the same domain.

My partner in this endeavour thinks it would be a good idea to open up a Blogger/WordPress blog and duplicate the on-site blog on this off-site blog. AFAIK the main reason for doing this is the SEO benefits of the inbound links that this off-site blog will create.

I think this is a bad idea, because:

  1. Effectively what we're doing is creating a (very small scale) link farm.
  2. We're more likely to be punished than rewarded (in SEO terms) for duplicating our content across domains.
  3. This introduces a problem of synchronising our content across domains. For example, if a blog post is edited on the on-site blog, then ideally the off-site blog should be similarly updated.

I know very little about SEO, so I would be interested to hear what more informed readers have to say.

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    You might know 'very little' about SEO, but your rationale for it being a "bad idea" is spot on.
    – Mike Hudson
    Jul 14, 2012 at 13:40
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    if you clone your blog to WP - why not use 301-redirect from the old-site to the new ? if you do that google will not consider your content as dup. An example: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/…
    – Nir Alfasi
    Jul 15, 2012 at 20:14
  • It's duplicate content and will be punished. You might lose all of your ranking on both sites. It's quite likely, actually. Do not do it.
    – InanisAtheos
    Jun 13, 2013 at 13:23

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I think now days Google is smart enough to identify duplicate contents . Google will punish severely for duplicate content.

  1. Google will good job of choosing a version ( chooses domain) of the content to show in search results.

  2. Better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects.

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  • Agreed. Duplicate content is never a good idea.
    – InanisAtheos
    Jun 13, 2013 at 13:24
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Do not duplicate - it is (sorry to disagree Panindra) unusual for Google to severely punish unless you are duplicating the entire website - with individual pages it is very likely it will simply ignore one of the pages.. the problem this raises is which page does it ignore (your site or the blog site).

However, if the entire site is duplicated, as Panindra said, you could end up in trouble.

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Google is an algorithm. They cannot detect duplicate content by comparing it with billions of pages in the web. Anyone who is familiar with ngrams and databases ought to know it. What they merely does is to rank the same content based on the authority and various other factors. This is what is done algorithmically. But manual penalty is a different story. One way or the other, duplicate content is not good in the long run.

But since the content is created by you, why not make one of the blog as canonical URL and let the other be the authority blog? That way you can use the same content, and don't have to fear about duplicate content.

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  • Yes, they can - especially if those two sites link to eachother. Which would not make sense anyways, since you'd have two sites competing for the same traffic. It's just not a good idea for any reason.
    – InanisAtheos
    Jun 13, 2013 at 13:25

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