Duplicate content on a mirror domain. How to fix?

Hello,


My main website is www.website.com and i have a mirror website with same content from my main website on another domain www.website1.com

When i check search console report on my main website www.website.com under "Links > Top linking sites" it lists the same pages with the same page URLs pointing from my mirror domain www.website1.com back to my main domain www.website.com

Also my mirror domain www.website1.com has several of the mirror pages indexed in google when i use the command "site:ww.website1.com "

1. How does this affect the SEO for my main website www.website.com ?
2. How does this affect the SEO for my main website when the top linking sites are linking back to my main website?
3. How does it affect the SEO for my main website if my mirror domain have the same duplicate urls and pages and content indexed on Google?

How do i fix this in the best way?

I must confess: I'm having a hard time understanding what you want to fix. I read, and re-read your post 4 times already and the more I read it the more confused I am....

You basically purposely created 2 identical sites (same content, same URL slugs, just the domains are different), and now you're wondering how / if the SEO of one of the sites is affected?? Your situation is a great description of the meme of a biker that inserts a stick between the rungs of his bicycle's front wheel, which makes him fall down and him blaming it on something completely unrelated lol (I love that meme by the way)

Anyway, sites with identical (plagiarized) content have been ranking well lately (see the journey section of the forum), but I don't think I've seen anyone yet trying to rank 2 different domains with 100% identical content and identical URL slugs. It probably can be done (haven't tested this yet), but... why??? I don't know, man.... No idea what you're trying to do, honestly. Maybe someone else can help you...

Why did you create 2 identical sites in the first place? Unless you're running a case study, it's better to delete one of the sites and reindex the existing one.

Forget how it would affect your main site's ranking.
Worry about the essential problem in your case : both of them died, penalized as duplicate to one another.

Fix : Kill one of them, before 6oogle kill them both.

Hey,

just to be more clear about this case.

I was doing SEO for 2 years for a client website and 6 months ago I was not informed about that they had also launched duplicate domains with the same content as the main client website.

Example:


Main client website is www.website.com


They had also launched duplicate mirror websites with same content as the main website with domains

www.website1.com
www.website2.com
www.website3.com


According to search console for the main website the traffic and rankings started to drop around the same time, 6 months ago, as they launched the duplicate websites.


6 months ago there were also google core updates and around that time someone by mistake requested a removal of the main client website from search console as well. Which was fixed.

So I suspect that the mirror websites with duplicate content can have affected the rankings drop on the main website. I check the duplicate websites and some of the pages from those are already indexed in Google with the same meta tags and content.

They still want to keep the websites live internally to use as affiliate landing pages to direct to the main website.

So is it enough to simply noindex the duplicate websites at this point and it should not affect the main website?


Or has Google already penalised the main website and what is the best solution going forward?