What's the "value" of finding and eliminating a total duplicate site hosted under another domain?

[Jennifer G]

Hi there. I'm coming up to the 90-day mark in my new position. I'm trying to place a monetary value on the things that I've accomplished in my first 60 days.

One of the difficult figures to evaluate is the "price tag" of finding and eliminating a totally duplicated website (that was automatically updating every time the "real" one was updated) that had been active for approximately 2 years.

We're a real estate company in the very competitive (and populous) Jacksonville, FL Metro-Area. I have no trouble putting a value on the SEO content I created after that was fixed, but based on a 1.5 million person potential market and the penalties we were having from the search engines and the effect it had on our branding (our "other" site was getting better search engine performance than the one we were using on all of our marketing collateral), and so on, I hardly know where to begin. My role as Real Estate Marketing Coordinator is just 66 days old and no one has had any performance figures for me to compare against, so feel free to be general in your estimations. Any supporting links or experts are welcomed!

[Jake]

Both sites are your properties?

Search engines reward sites for having valuable original content, there is less value in what is identified as duplicate material. If you have a specific site you want to get the ranking fom te material you can use the cannonical tag on the secondary site to point to the official source of the material, giving that site the ranking credit. While mainly for indicating the master copy within a site cannonical can also be used to point to another source site
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-...ard-friday
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guid...nd-why-not
http://www.seomoz.org/q/similar-pages-no...parameters

A measurable site traffic factor is the search engine ranking, the #1 result in search results has been find in some studies to get about 35% of all clicks, moving up 2 positions in the page 1 search results gets approximately double the clicks. After you have compiled a list of valuable real world searh phrases, perhaps using the Google Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
You can periodically use rank checking tools to automatically check your site ranking in sarch results for the entire keyword list. (That same keyword list should be consulted when creating content for the site)

There are tools that will report your search result position for various search keywords:
Use either the free rankchecker for firefox http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/ to generate a search ranking report for the list of keywords, the latter has some other analysis functions. (The paid version of SEO Powersuite probably makes sense in your business, it allows saving results for month by month comparison)

Remember to try the same search phrases, with: ,your city appended to the ends for local ranking.

[Hal Smith]

You just need to keep tweaking your site so that it is worth seeing for the search engines.

Hal Smith
URLdreamer Consultant

[J]

i think the answer you are looking for is the search value of the keywords that the other site was receiving per day/week/month---calculated for the 2+ years

another thing you should consider is the traffic...obviously the other site was getting some traffic, why not do a 301 on that site...which would also get you the boost from backlinks, etc

EDIT: something i forgot to mention, you should value it in a multiple eg: when buying a site it is valued as a multiple of earnings...some sites on Flippa.com go for 10 times 1 year earnings

[Piyush]

Copy scape is a good tool to check which websites are copying which pages of yours. If the websites which have duplicate content are not your domains.

Only thing can you do here is make your main website content rich. Make sure your site has unique and fresh content. This will help in long term to your website. There is no other formula. Sites get ranked on the relevancy of content with the keywords you want to get rank for.

If you can not add content on to main site. Worth installing a wordpress blog on to the site and get some quality content. People may copy content and Google will reward you for original content