Which is the best way to manage a website with one or more mirrors so that:
- Google don’t consider it as “dupicated content”
- The website is correctly indexed
- No inconsistencies or duplicated information are present in Google Analytics
- The Google webmaster guidelines in general are respected
NOTE: I’m not sure if I should ask this question here or in ServerFault. It looks a bit in the middle between programming and server administration. Let me know if you think ServerFault represent a more appropriate place for this and I’ll move it.
Thanks.
If you need to host on multiple servers using round-robin DNS (or other load-balancing techniques) is a good idea. This will let you use a single host name and would generally not create problems with crawling and indexing on the search engine side (since the crawlers don’t see multiple URLs for the content).
If you need to host using separate host or domain names (for whatever reason) it’s best to pick one preferred version and to make sure that only that one is indexed. A way to do that could be to use rel=canonical link elements on the alternate versions. In general, however, I’d recommend working to prevent multiple host/domain names from being visible to the user & search engines by keeping the technical hosting issues (mirrored hosts) out of sight (as mentioned in the first part).
If you need to use multiple ccTLDs to host on country-specific domains then I’d strongly recommend making sure that you actually have country-specific content on each site (and not just mirroring one version). More about this is at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html