Worried About Duplicate Content?

The search engines are getting smarter and it is the talk in webmaster forums all around – does duplicate content hurt your search engine page ranks? At least six months ago and maybe even before that, Google came right out and said don’t put duplicate content on your site, we don’t like it and it may even hurt you. There was a big push by most webmasters to address this issue head on. We went so far as to block robots from our text version HMTL pages in our robots.txt file.

Now the questions about duplicate content have surfaced again. Google has a new patent disclosure that was released about 6 weeks ago that addressed the indexing and rating of duplicate content and this has opened up the topic all over again.

One of the thorniest questions that we have been asked recently is on domain name masking and is this duplicate content. In this case we have one website which has set up in their hosting panel a new domain and masked the name so that all of the original content on the one site is now shown dynamically with a new domain name. The question is will Google frown on this. My take is that there is only one set of pages on the server and the new domain name is being created dynamically. I do not think that Google will call this duplicate content as there is only one set of pages for the spider to index. However would I recommend setting up more domains like this – no, would I recommend moving away from this tactic – yes, would I be worried about my site that is currently doing this – no, would I start to move away from the dynamic domain and just move to the use of one domain – yes. This is certainly a gray area and I would appreciate your take on what you think is the proper answer. Do you feel that this situation with domain masking is duplicate content?