Effect of duplicate sites with search engines

[slobizman]

I have a simple web site I designed for one of my names -- AltEnergyToday.com. It uses a RSS parser to display feeds from various news sites and blogs, relevant to Alternative Energy. I've had it up for a few weeks and it's getting around 20-100 hits a day generating and generating about a buck a day in Adsense revenue. I've seen comments from visitors who really like ti so I'm hoping the traffic will increase as time goes on.

Here's my question: I have three other similar sounding names I just purchased: AltEnergyNow.com, AltEnergyDaily.com and AltEnergyReport.com. I'm wondering which of the two following options I should choose to do with them:

1. Keep these other names parked, and linked to the developed page.

2. Create three new sites with the three new names, whose pages are identical to the developed site.

If I choose option #2, will the search engines balk if they recognize the pages to be about the same. (I could make some changes to make them different).

Would option #2 increase my revenue more than parking the three?

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By the way, any suggestions on how to make my developed site more popular or profitable?

[austinandrew]

For option 2, it is likely that the search engines will <i>eventually</i> tag your sites as duplicate content. But since the content changes frequently on the sites it might take a while for this to happen. Even on sites that I pull in articles that are duplicates I can usually stay in Google for a long time.

Have you thought about paying perhaps $35-$50 per site to have "original" articles created? You can get people on elance to write basic keyword rich articles for about $5-$10 each on various topics. You could add a few original articles to your sites in addition to the RSS feeds and do quite well in the search engines.

Good luck,
Andrew