In that case do you think that the benefit of the the keywords in the redirected domain name is completely lost? That’s what I’m trying to find out (one thing anyway).

If you read Vingolds comment it would seem to indicate anecdotally that some benefit is retained even if there isn’t any real content on either site - not what I would have in mind to do by the way.

BTW - if you are in a niche, then the actual page content is less important than your title, desc and internal anchors - vary those and you will see a diff, regardless of the content. Proven for my extreme niche sites. 7-9 results in page 1 and 2 for keyword for same client.

Either way the original content on the original domain ceases to exist doesn’t it?

I think that would be interesting to try and test.

The other SEOs have weighed in plenty on your original experiment.

Good stuff!

Personally I think that it’s spam if it’s pushed out with the intent of getting it in front of as many random eyeballs as possible with the hope that a hapless few will convert. Movie previews force fed to video renters is often spam.

If the content is crafted with an attempt to appeal to as many targeted eyeballs as possible then I don’t think that really is spam - no matter what the content is. In the arbitrage example I cited you would probably not click on the Adwords link if you weren’t looking for a bond, so I don’t think that is spam.

I imagine it’s really hard for a program to make that distinction though.

Agreed, although the cheapskate in me doesn’t like it.

I would also plan on tracking the post-301 data at preset intervals (30 days, 60 days, 6 months, etc.)

Absolutely, the longer it goes, the more accurate and useful the information would be.

What’s nearly impossible to tell, though, is how strong that advantage is. What if you tweak some keywords on the other page? What if one of the pages pick up a handful of links (even just 2 or 3)?

Because of all the variables involved it would probably hard to really quantify all of that, but we should be able to get a better idea. Once the experiment is going there are lots of tests that could be done using the same test bed of separate but equal domains.

Thanks for your input.

I would also plan on tracking the post-301 data at preset intervals (30 days, 60 days, 6 months, etc.).

Of course, the key phrase in all of this is “all else being equal”. Without links and other factors, I strongly suspect a matching domain provides an edge. What’s nearly impossible to tell, though, is how strong that advantage is. What if you tweak some keywords on the other page? What if one of the pages pick up a handful of links (even just 2 or 3)? It would be interesting, once you’re done, to see what it takes to offset the advantage. There’s a lot of SEO where we know (or very strongly suspect) that a certain factor matters, but we don’t really know how much it matters relative to other, similar factors.

So I asked - since I have access to literally tens of thousands of unique and exportable records that contain the same info - if I was to make a site of nothing but these records - would it be considered spam? How about if I added these records to one of my already existing real estate sites?

I thought it might be spam because I thought the definition of spam was something that was automated and produced only to increase rankings or traffic.

Certainly my approach would be that - but on a page-by-page basis it would be similar to the BaltimoreSun.com feature. So why should it have any less value?

Someone responded to my comment by saying “if its not useful - then its spam”.

Well - golly gee. That is an awful high threshold to reach. I mean - useful to whom?

For instance nearly half of the political commentary on the web is probably not of much use to the other half of the population that doesn’t share those views.

And what about things like SEOmoz - is that really useful to most people? It has been my experience that 99% of people I encounter have no idea what SEO even is. If they were to stumble upon a random SEOmoz article - how useful would it be to them?

Do we always need to be directed to something useful when we click on the top search result? I think that is an awful tall order for the search engines and for site owners - we can’t really control what long tail searches we rank for.

(with the last name of Goldsmith I routinely rank for long tail search terms where people are looking for someone to make a wedding ring or something - but I’m not spamming the term goldsmith - and no I don’t make jewelry).

Furthermore, just because a site is “Made for Adsense” and is full of ezine articles and other standard content - doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.

If I go to one of these sites and get my question answered by one of the ezine articles - then its useful and shouldn’t be considered spam.

I used to make this argument a lot - but I’ve backed down from it because no one wants to agree with me - even though their only argument to counter it was basically akin to “MFA sites are spam - everyone knows that”.

To them, if it isn’t unique content handwritten for that particular website (or one of their syndicated partners) - then it is spam.

Useful or not - that would make the non-spam web a very small place indeed.

That strongly reinforces my suspicions, and backs up the anecdotal evidence I mentioned.

I had been trying to recapture a keyphrase that I had lost - valuable because of it’s high conversion rate. I registered valuable-key-phrase.com put it on an add on domain (on top of a different hosting package) with nothing but an .htaccess file pointing it at my landing page. Within 48 hours I’m back at #1 in the serps.

I’m still going to set up the experiment though because I’ve thought of too many cool things I can find out using a testbed of several identical (and yet not duplicate) websites.