101 Articles Mirror Websites
MIRROR WEBSITES
Mirror websites are a major problem with search engines. Even today mirror websites are prevalent in many industries. Mirror websites mostly exists in quote engines, web builders, template based blogs, lead generation websites etc.
Web builder mirrors: Many site owners are not aware how to develop a good website from scratch. Either they need to rely on other web development providers or rely builders that offer easy website development. Web builders are available in all platforms and they are easy to us. But a major a problem with web builders the cough out a lot of mirror sites. Almost all the pages that are generated are similar on sites are generated using the web builder. So if 100 users use the same builder to create sites then they will have 100 homepage, about us, contact us etc pages similar. These sorts of mirrors don't add any value to end user.
Quote engines: A typical example of a quote engine we had experience working in quotit.net. This site creates websites for its agents and mirrors all the quote contents on all the sites. If you want a individual health insurance, dental insurance or life insurance you need to use the same quote engine that other mirror website uses. We had a change to optimize 5 quotit sites way back in 2007 where all the core contents were same. Though this is not intentional search engine manipulation still it is a menace for the search engines. They need to figure which site is unique and which site is mirror. Unless you make each site unique search engines will filter most of the mirror sites.
Template based blogs: Wordpress, BlogSpot, and blog drive all provide an admin platform where you can edit the pages you create. Most of them follow a simple template system unless a unique custom made template is used. Spammers create 100s of mirror of these templates because they are very easy to create and stuff them with mirrored contents. These blogs don't add any value to the users and most of the spammer created ones is stuffed with junk information to mislead the search engines.
Lead generation websites: I have seen some search engine optimization individuals create 100s of domains to generate leads for a particular service or product. All they have is a simple page with a form where the user needs to fill up their information to move car or request a financial service etc. These leads are mostly sold to third parties.
We can come up with a big list of mirror website issues, search engines have been effective in handling these sites and today most of the mirror websites are gone and only genuine quality sites rank.
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Images |
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Screen Shots |
The above mentioned screen shot explains the description of a mirror website.
The image is an extract from two different sites talking about the disadvantages and effects of mirror websites.
Mirror sites are those that are the replica of the original website. Mirror websites are created in order to increase the search engine rankings. But this tactic is considered as a black hat SEO by Google and if any site is found to be using such a tactic then that particular site will end up in getting de-indexed from the search engine results.
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Working Examples |
The mentioned image highlights screenshots from four different sites that uses Quoits' template pages for their websites. These are pure examples of mirror webpages. It is even observed that each site just has the license number which is different, other things remain exactly same. These kinds of practices are penalized by the search engines.
Lead generation sites
The below mentioned screen shot is an example of a lead generation site. This site is contains text relating to lead generation for car transport quote. Every webpage in the site has a subscription form. The site does not contain any contact details about the site owner and is created purely with the intention to generate leads.
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |