What is a mirror site?
It is an exact replica of a website, hosted at a remote location and used to improve the availability of the original site. It can be static (most common), which requires frequent updates. It can also be live, which changes when the original one does. The mirror can be a copy of the entire website, or it can be used as a file archive. Some websites have multiple mirror sites.
Why should you mirror a site?
The original purpose of a mirror site was to combat censorship. In the event a website is shut down, a copy of it is available at a remote location, just in case. Along the same lines, a mirror can be used as a storehouse for old versions of websites for anyone who needs to view them.
Today, there are many additional legitimate reasons to develop a mirror website, which generally have to do with managing site traffic and keeping servers running smoothly.
What are some of those reasons?
• To manage sudden traffic increases
• To get around firewalls
• To speed up downloads
• To balance load
• To synchronize files
If used properly, website mirrors help you to improve the reliability and availability of your website, which not only gives you peace of mind but improves your online reputation.
From an SEO standpoint, there are important considerations when mirrored sites are used. Since mirror sites are exact duplicates of your main site, you should have controls in place to make sure Google, Yahoo and Bing only cache your preferred site. One of the problems with live mirrored sites is that a search engine may consider new site content to be “original” to the first site it spiders after a change, so your preferred site may not get the credit it deserves. Search engines are skeptical of duplicate content in general, so one part of your site that should not be mirrored might be the Robots.txt file, which can instruct search engines to ignore content on the version that is not expected to get search engine rankings.
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