Competitors have local "mirror" sites

[diogenes]

I have noticed that some of my competitors have set up "mirror" homepages set up for different counties, towns, or suburbs. In one case the mirror homepages are virtually identical escept for the title and in the other case about half of the content id duplicate and the other half is different. both of these competors have excellent rankings and traffic. I am surprised about these results, does anyone care to comment about it and is this a grey hat technique that is likely to be penalized eventually.

thx

Diogenes

[BrianCrouch]

Are any of these dynamic landing pages?

[diogenes]

Well, unfortunately I do not know what a dynamic landing page is, or how to tell. So, could you enlighten me and then we would be closer to the answer?

thx

diogenes

[RyanKent]

Hi Paul.

You mentioned that half of the content was duplicate, while half was unique. These pages may be unique enough to be considered as original pages. There are many factors involved and it is not possible to share much more in a generic Q&A without reviewing the sites.

To answer your question to Brian, a dynamic web page in this context is one where the content changes based on user information. For example, if you are connecting from Dallas, Texas then the web page would display the weather in Dallas, local news, etc. for that given area. If you then connected to the same site from Miami, Florida the weather and local news would be given for Miami. That would be one example of a dynamic web page.

In short, it is entirely possible to offer localized landing pages for specific areas in a white hat manner. It is of course also possible to do so using black hat techniques. Based on the 50% variance of content and the fact their performance is doing well, it sounds like they may be doing things in an acceptable manner. We need the URLs for the main and local sites to offer further insight.

[diogenes]

One of them is http://nyuncontesteddivorceattorney.com/

another www.padivorce.com

Paul

[RyanKent]

Thanks for the URLs Paul.

The two examples you offered are two unique websites. I looked at the IPs of both sites and they are completely different. The WhoIs site registration information is completely different. The web design of each site is completely different. The NY site is a wordpress website while the other site seems to be based off a basic site template. Without reviewing the content, there appear to be two completely unique websites.

When I look at the content provided on these pages, it is not duplicated at all. One site has a video, the other does not. They even have different addresses and phone numbers. Even under scrutiny these sites have the appearance they are completely unrelated. If these two sites represent the same company, they certainly did a good enough job of differentiating them to earn them both a place in the search indexes.

[diogenes]

Sorry I didn't make myself clear. These sites are not related but both use the same strategy. Look at the footer links. Incidentally I came accross another thread in this forum where another lawyer (coincidentally) was complaining that the more he optimized the lower his rankings. The answer was that he was creating a lot of duplicate content by trying to set up separate pages for each town and village. Maybe the 2 sites don't work because of the strategy but despite it. They both have massive numbers of backlinks and domains linking in. What do you think?

Paul

[RyanKent]

They both have massive numbers of backlinks and domains linking in. What do you think?

Looking at the NY site, it has a total of 2300 links from 46 domains. That is not a lot at all. One site wide footer link can offer 10k+ links from a single site. The focus should be on the number of linking domains which is 46 in this case.

When I review the links for this site in OSE, they seem quite natural. There are a couple legal directories but nothing unexpected. The anchor text varies nicely and the link profile is what I would expect to find. For OSE I usually apply the following filters: followed+301, only external, on this root domain, group by domain. Take a look for yourself and I think you will agree there doesn't seem to be anything unusual.

This NY site is not setting up "mirror" sites, but landing pages. Mirror sites are basically identical sites set up under different domains. Landing pages are pages within a site designed to welcome visitors who locate your site through specific search terms or marketing ads.

If this was my SEO client, I would advise them to increase the amount of unique content on their landing pages. I am not comfortable at all with these pages in their current form. With that said, Google apparently is comfortable with them and is indexing these pages.

The site's DA is 31, and PA around 30 for these pages. These sites are very easily beatable with proper SEO work. If I were in your position I would be very pleased to compete with these sites. No matter what site you build, you are going to have competition in SERPs.

What results are you concerned about? I presume you are searching for the exact phrases in their domain name? These types of sites usually do well in domain name match searches, but otherwise they don't fare well. If you offer a basic site with good content and solid SEO, you will solidly beat these types of sites every day.