Let us now make a short digression and explain how mirror sites are treated by the search engines. The official guidelines of all major search engines say that if a spider finds a page with the content duplicate to the content of another page, it will not index the second page, so no matter how many mirrors of a site you have, only the first one will be indexed and later found by the search engine for Web surfers' queries. This concerns the mirrors that are located on different domains as well as the mirrors located within the same domain, e.g. on different subdomains or in different folders.

The only "valid" excuse for having a mirror in the eyes of the search engines would be if you change your domain name and move the site to another domain. In this case, you are allowed to arrange a redirect from the old domain to the new one (thus, it will not actually be a real mirror). If you're registered in a directory, let the editor of your category know about the switch to a new domain.

There are no penalties for having mirrors; however, only one mirror will be indexed by the search engines, because it makes no sense for them to store two copies of the same data in their index.

Let's get back and see how we can track mirrors with the help of HitLens.

If copies of your Web site are placed on several servers, you need to insert the tracking codes into all pages on all mirror Web sites. Remember that the tracking code inserted into the identical pages has to be identical too; it means that the tracking code in the page "about.htm" on the server 1 must be the same as the tracking code in the page "about.htm" on the server 2. If you inserted the tracking code with the help of the Wizard, it is a wise decision to upload the same local copy to all servers unless you have a unique reason not to.

Next, it's important to properly modify the file "tracking.js" that must be uploaded to the root directory of your site on all mirror hosting servers. This file must contain a slight difference on each server: the variable "SERVER_NUMBER" must correspond to the number of mirror server. It may be a number ranging from 1 to 16 (as HitLens supports load balancing tracking for only up to 16 servers).

So, open this file "tracking.js" in some text editor and find the following line:

var SERVER=1;

Replace 1 with the actual number of the server, save the file and upload it to the corresponding mirror server. Repeat this procedure with every mirror.

As soon as you complete this step, the load balancing tracking begins. You will be able to see the load distribution between your servers with the help of "Server Cluster Load Balance" report under the "Activity" report group.

What to remember

1. Having mirror sites doesn't involve any penalties from the search engines, however usually only one of your mirror sites will be indexed by the search engine spiders.
2. HitLens supports multiple mirrors tracking. To do it, you need to assign each server a number from 1 to 16, modify the file "tracking.js" and upload each variation to the corresponding mirror server.
3. You will be able to access balancing reports under the "Activity" report group, in the "Server Cluster Load Balance" report.

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