Load balancing - duplicate content?

[ChrisHillfd]

Our site switches between www1 and www2 depending on the server load, so (the way I understand it at least) we have two versions of the site.

My question is whether the search engines will consider this as duplicate content, and if so, what sort of impact can this have on our SEO efforts? I don't think we've been penalised, (we're still ranking) but our rankings probably aren't as strong as they should be.

The SERPs show a mixture of www1 and www2 content when I do a branded search. Also, when I try to use any SEO tools that involve a site crawl I usually encounter problems.

Any help is much appreciated!

[neooptic]

I think a cross domain canonical should work for this. You can then specify which is the preferred version, which will be used in the SERPs.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

[ChrisHillfd]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Do we need to add the canonical tag to both versions of the page, i.e. on www1 and www2?

[AdamThompson]

Yes, you probably should.

[TellThemEverything]

Agreed. That's what I would do too

[ChrisHillfd]

Thanks for the advice, guys.

Much appreciated.