Hey all, I have a question around co branded sites and duplicate content. www.mainsite.com www.partner1.mainsite.com www.partner2.mainsite.com The partners want to be able to add their own unique copy and meta, same subject matter, but each want to target their keyword groups. But this feels very black hat and spammy to me... Have I answered my own question?
Sorry, to follow on, if unique meta for each subdomin is a no go, is it just case of same meta across the pages and applying rel=cononical to mainsite.com?
Hey Carswell - hows Bangkok? It's a bit confusing I admit. A client wants to launch co-branded sites for their business partners to send traffic to, EG www.client.partner1.com www.client.partner2.com etc... The page names will be the same, same language, same subject matter, but the client wants to allow each of the partners to update their own meta titles, descriptions and copy for each subdomain, so each partner site is targeting similar, but different keyword groups. Do you see a problem with this?
As long as the main body content is different it will be ok. Same page name, same navigation system same layout all is fine. Oh and Bangkok is great.
I am fimiliar with what you are talking about, unfortunately partner sites ( co branded duplicates with unique title and meta data ) do not often rank high because you cannot directly control the content (and of course it is duplicate) so to circumvent this issue, you need to generate your own unique content (perhaps wordpress blogging) and send this traffic to the partner cobrand, hope this helps, cheers!
Thanks guys, let's say the content could be unique too. I understand that new subdomain, unique meta, unique content in theory should be OK, but when those pages are just rewrites of other pages that cover the same subjects on the same domain, then things starts to look a bit spammy to me. There's no reason for it other than capturing more keyword phrases, we'd be making content for Search Engines and not for people - see what I mean? I'm worried about hurting the authority of the entire domain.... The partners will have oodles of traffic from their main sites to send, so I'm thinking, index the client.partnersite.com and use rel=cononical on that subdomain. I suppose unless the partners are going to out the effort in to optmise their sites, then all this is academic.... Any more opinions warmly welcomed, not a lot out there on this...