Will duplicating my website kill SEO?

[Kpick]

Hi All,
I’m thinking of going after local markets for one of our sites.
I was thinking in adding pages with “City+keyword” and just copying my home page.

Ie.
www.MySite.com would be the home page.


I would then add dozens of pages such as
www.MySite.com/SanDiego.
www.MySite.com/SanFrancisco
www.MySite.com/Chicago


I would then do a small amount of back linking to each sub-page with my keyword and the City name.


Each of these additional sub-pages would be a mirror of the home page.
Do you think “G” would be bothered by dozens or even hundreds of additional Pages of content that is the same as my home page?

I know a lot of folks will clone a blog or wordpress theme, this is just a slight play on that.


Any thoughts or advice?


Thanks in advance,
K.

[Matt Ward]

In my opinion, that is a terrible idea. That is the definition of "duplicate content" and would probably make your website tank and not rank for anything at all.

[Becker13]

The duplicate content rules does not apply to the original content. If that were true lil pricks could just duplicate your site and lower its rankings

[Jermaine Tabor]

Can you get an original article written for each page so every page has unique content?

[BarryWheeler]

If each subpage is going to be a "mirror" as you are saying, one would assume same content, etc????

[Kpick]

Originally Posted by BarryWheeler

If each subpage is going to be a "mirror" as you are saying, one would assume same content, etc????

Yes,
all the pages would be exactly the same.

K.

[Kay King]

What you are describing is google's definition of "duplicate content". Most who talk about the subject here are not informed on what the duplicate content penalty was when it was instituted.

It was imposed on site owners who took the same content and posted that content on multiple pages of one site. They would change the page title but not the content - and the purpose was to increase adsense earnings and to increase the "size" of the site. Didn't work for long.

I'd take the time or pay the money to add unique content on each page.

kay

[AustinKane]

Short answer: Do NOT do this.

[o2webtech]

It will not make any effects over Google and you will not get what kind of results you want online. So its better to spend some time to write unique content to get Google search engine benefits.

[Brennan Mack]

Google won't necessarily penalize you for duplicate content. Like others have said, if you could, you could destroy some else's site with that technique. However, Google CERTAINLY won't reward you for copy/pasting you content all over, and may de-index some of the pages. Google will keep what it considers the "original", which is usually achieved by use of canonical URLs.

But more to the point, copying content like that just LOOKS TERRIBLE. I've seen sites like that and the first thing I do as a consumer is leave and check out a different site that has more interesting, unique content.

[warrich]

Make slight variation to every page, you can't just re-write like 400 pages, so just modify the pages. Google loves unique and fresh content so the changed version of the content even though the meaning would be the same, would be a great plus. This would be much better than having a mirrored page.