Duplicate Blogs and Drip Feed Content

I would like to discuss several erroneous concepts in the website development world. On flippa, as part of their website listing they report on the number of duplicate sites.

Relative to older html adsense type static sites there is probably some value in knowing how many other "copies" are on the web.

But, today, with dynamic blogs, this should not even be an issue anymore. This would be especially true when using virtually any drip feed system, from the day you install the site it will follow its own content path.

A few months ago, I built 5 wordpress 'demo/test' sites. I started by building out one site, based upon one theme/topic, used exactly the same plugins (even the seo plugins and the same sitemap plugin) and generated a full year of drip feed content (back filling) with an average of 30 posts per month for 12 categories (300+ posts).

I then cloned 4 exact copies of this site, and I even installed them on the same dedicated server account, sharing the same IP, and the same custom DNS. I then made some 'minor' changes to the drip feed system and walked away from them for 90 days. The drip feed system continued to pot an average of 30 posts per month for the next 90 days.

When I went back and looked at the sites, all were ranked well for the short period of time, each site had over 1,000 pages indexed on Google (site:<domain-name>) and no one site seemed to dominate.

This would appear to literally destroy any and all references to duplicate content as well as the arguments against (good) drip feed systems.

I also cloned out 5 additional sites, on the same dedicated server, sharing the same IP and the same custom DNS. On these, I deactivated the drip feed system BEFORE cloning the sites and forced these sites to rely upon manual posting alone. I then proceeded to post an average of 3 posts per month for each of the 12 categories for the following 90 days. Again, all sites were equally ranked and no one site appeared to dominate. However, these manual blogs all averaged less than 250 pages indexed on Google (again that is with site:<domain-name> entered in the address bar.

It would seem that starting with a common cloned site, with significant backfilled content and a full drip feed system will far exceed the benefits of a similar website with no full drip feed system. Second, it would appear that starting with ten sites, all originally cloned from one master site, were not penalized for the initial 12 months of common back-filled content.

Comments - Questions - Experiences - and yes even complaints are welcome...