OK slightly off topic but what do I mean by Cruise Deals Dupe Google? Knowing a little about search engine optimization I was plugging through endless cruise related search results last night and found that Cruise Deals (.co.uk) have exact copies of their websites within at least 2 sub domains, one being google.cruisedeals and another being msn.cruisedeals.
So why is this duping Google for cruise deals? Well Google tell us for one not to have duplicate content, this is a blatant breach of their webmaster guidelines. Sub domains are treated almost like individual domains and so by doing this Cruise Deals get 3 bites at the Cherry. What they are also doing is giving three times as many links to their 4 other websites from links down the left hand side of their web pages. If you were to check, lets say Ski Deals, you will see that their is at least 1 sub domain (google.skideals(.co.uk)) again giving extra links back to the Cruise Deals website.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that using other websites to gain position is necessarily wrong, using duplicate content in the way that Cruise Deals has done is very, very wrong.
