As these posts evolve you’ll find I’m a huge fan of Google. Not just because they rule the universe I work in, but because they are fair. They provide a lot of great tools for free and, though they won’t share their algorithm, they share lots of great information about how to use design and content guidelines that help you get search placement in their engine. Though I’ve worked in the internet space for 10 years, I’ve been involved with search marketing for just five years. The stakes for winning at search engine optimization and marketing are high so it’s no wonder that there are a lot of black hat seo techniques put to use by less-than-scruplous developers and web marketers. Google is crystal clear about what spam is and, though there really is no excuse, many companies participate in spam. Google’s content guidelines read very specifically, “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” Trying to get search ranking by creating duplicate content across multiple sites is bad for everybody, it’s bad for the engines because now they’re serving multiple duplicate results for a search inquiry. It’s bad for customers because they have to wade through the duplicate sites, it’s bad for the site owners because eventually, they will be blocked from the index. Last piece of advise, make pages for users, not for search engines. If you’re not sure, ask yourself when you’re creating more content for your site or another subdomain, is this helpful to my customers? If it’s not, don’t do it. Period.