The use of a ghost site for SEO purposes

[SEOBirmingham81]

Hi Guys,

Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site.

After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com.

It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain?

Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic?

Thanks,

Dan

[rjonesx. 0]

The appropriate solution in this place would be to employ the hreflang tag to related the two geographically separate sites together. However, before you take that step, I would look to make sure the previous SEO company which created the .com did not point any harmful links at the .com domain which would make it inadvisable to connect the two sites together. Use OpenSiteExplorer to look at the backlink profile and use Google Webmaster Tools to authorize the .com site and look for any manual penalty notices. If all looks clear, go ahead forward with the implementation of the hreflang tag.

Good luck and feel free to ask more questions here!

[SEOBirmingham81]

Thanks Both,

Pretty much confirms our thoughts here and yes Eddie - it appears to be a smash and grab job.

Dan

[O2C]

Certainly sounds dodgy, but suddenly removing all of those backlinks might cause you some SEO issues.

Depending on how Google is currently reading your site it may improve as your site would seem less spammy without them or it may really hurt the site (at least to start with) loosing that many back links would maybe make Google think something is up with your site?

I would take the bullet and remove the duplicate content but warn your clients that it may take a while for the natural benefits to come through. Because if your site isn't penalised yet for having that many dodgy backlinks and duplicate content it soon will be!

[vital_hike]

Certainly seems like the wrong thing to do. A good test is that if you think it may be dodgy it probably is. I certainly wouldn't recommend it as a tactic. There are potentially multiple issues with this....duplicate content as you mentioned but also dilution of real links. Good quality legitimate links could link to the Ghost site and therefore not count for the real site.

I have seen issues where it is a legitimate attempt to have a .com and .co.uk on the same shop and ended up with both versions online due to incompetent development but I didn't have to deal with cleaning it up.

Un-picking that could be messy. A good example of quick fix SEO for a fast buck I suspect.

[seomozinator]

5mil+ links?! Wow!

What's their spam score? I'm surprised they are not blocked or something

To answer your question - what does common sense tells you? The job of google and google bots is pretty much based on common sense. So, duplicate content website, ridiculous amount of links, no referral traffic - all these are obvious signals to run, Forrest, run!