Hi A friend wants to build a website with a number of shops that are aimed for different types of clients. The shops have the same content, and he wants to put them in different subdomains on the website. Is that a good idea? Won't this be a reason for a Google duplicate-content penalty? If yes, then what is the best way to proceed in this kind of situation? Thanks!
Is he trying to rank with all of the different sub-domains or just create them to drive specific client traffic to? If he is not worried about all of them ranking, then he could create them and just put noindex on all of them except the original.
And you are saying that if he doesn't put the "noindex" tags on the other subdomains, he could suffer from a penalty?
There should not be a duplicate content penalty, but all of the content will not rank well and could affect the ability of any of it to rank well. Without adding the 'noindex' tag you leave it up to Google and the other search engines to determine which site is the original and should rank. You can always create it and see how it does and then add the 'noindex' tag later if it negatively affects your rankings. Of course, this is more risky if the original site is ranking well at this time. I have seen large sites duplicate content on subdomains without the 'noindex' tag and get away with it in the past, but I think it is less likely to be successful after Panda.
Yes, what Revium said! I'd add that I have seen autoblogs that still rank well even though they have little or no unique content.. This won't reflect poorly on the author of the original content but it may look bad for those copying the content. Now, if Google does some crawling and sees you are in any way affiliated with the content, that's where they can ding you.. But it's not as common as people would say, at least in my experiences. Still, better safe than sorry... "Noindex" will keep search engines from indexing the duplicate content.. I would also do a "nofollow" attribute for any link that can eventually lead to the "main site", just to be safe.
Google doesn't have a duplicate content 'penalty' as such; even after the panda update. Google does not penalize duplicate content, it simply won't rank all pages with the same content. Google takes what it considers the most relevant page and simply ignores (for the most part) the rest. If you want all pages to rank, put original content on each page. Or simply re-write (spin) the content.
Alright guys, thank you. That was more or less what I was thinking - It's not that Google downgrades your pagerank or something like that if it discovers a lot of duplicate content, it's just that they won't rank your other duplicate pages. And yes, it makes sense to noindex the other pages/subdomains, because this gives you control over which pages will get ranked (it's not that smart to let Google decide this) Thanks again
Some people seem to have an opininon that a site will get deindexed if it contains duplicate content. Many people submit articles to syndication sites that are not spun. Those duplicate articles get sent out to any number of article directories without suffering any consequences. Those directory sites don't get deindexed nor do they fall in the rankings. There is no penalty for duplicate content! But Google is understandably not keen to promote duplicate content. You have to look at it from Google's point of view. They don't want the same content showing up in all of the top search engine postions. That would not provide a good experience to their users. They are not interested in penalizing you for your marketing efforts, they are only interested in providing a quality user experience with some variety of content on the search pages. And when you stop to think about it, that's actually a benefit to all of us.