Hi all, So i found this one nice template that works with many of my micro sites. The question is this If i have the html/css the same but content different such as : title, meta keywords, description and the actual content text different. Will google think this is a duplicate site? Now add a twist, rather than 2 sites using the same template - i want to create 20 sites using the same template- again Main body, title, text etc.. would be different but the CSS, HTML tables and such will be the same Does anyone know? Also i didn't want to post this in the adsense sub-forum because the main question is "overall google" but would this idea still follow adsense TOS? (i can't see it being a problem) does anyone else? Thanks
Google does not care about the visual appearance of the site. As long as they can spider/crawl the site properly everything comes down to your content. Have you ever heard of the text browser called Lynx? This is basically how search engine spiders see your site just in a text-only version. Many businesses have multiple sites and sub domains (which are treated as separate sites) all with the same appearance or "theme" and it doesn't matter to search engines what matters is what are on the pages and who is linking to them.
Thanks for your input Brad - Never heard of Lynx. Just got some info from wikipedia - for anyone interested here is an interesting tool to preview any site how Lynx previews sites: http://sucuri.net/index.php?page=tools&title=text-browser Very interesting
I agree with Brad's statements and would add that a good, clean theme with well defined css divs that validates for html and css will make it much easier to maintain all 20 sites and should be easy for gbot to crawl, index, and categorize. The structural work up front does still have benefit IMO.
I agree with brad because google spider can not read image graphics.we can use same theme or template for multiple websites.i saw may people using same theme for multiple micro sites using word press.The important thing is content and link from other sites.if you use unique content then you can build as many as you want and google won't bother your sites themes.if you still feel it is a problem then you can word press themes which are available a lot different styles.
Is this the same services or product??? on the template its not a problem because many user use same template it would vary in the content, don't use the same meta tags try to rumble the words to come up on different variety.
Agree with Brad that graphics has nothing to do with with the site being crawled (or not) As long as the actual copy on the site is unique. I've done the same thing in the past for sites using wordpress. however, from a user's perspective, some users may turned off if your sites look too cookie-cutter... if you know what i mean.
There are even lots of themes and template for blogger and wordpress users and it is just fine on Google..
A one-for-one copy is bad. A unique site built on a common template is OK. If the content is different, Google will not have a problem with you using a template. However, Google tends to treat 100% similar websites as one site, and awards all the link juice to the one it determines to be the original. It doesn't have to be a radical difference to be treated as original content. Just enough that Google can see that it's meant to be different. I ran into this issue when I was originally building my own automated parking server. What I found was that just randomizing a few elements then including a few unique details, such as the domain name and the date, was enough for Google to treat the different sites parked on the server as unique content.
that's fine and you can see many of the website are actually use same template The important is the content itself
as everyone else already mentioned....duplicate content is the only thing you can get penalized for. And thats usaully only across the same domain. duplicate content on another domain may not necessarily penalize you becuase Google knows that you cannot control someone else copying and publishing your site under a different domain.
thanks for all the answers guys. The reasoning for my question was this. I found a way to serve pages by doing Server side includes - here is an example: Site has a basic template - but SSI populate the title, meta, keyword tags, main article content, footer info and a few other things from content in a database. my domains point to the same "index.php" and inside i reference the include filters based on the URL. This way i only manage one set of "pages" but the content is all driven by values in the DB. i even have my main header (banner image) coming from the DB I know i don't want to keep too many pages using the same template - i'll probably for now end up with 10 domains using the same index.php I'll work on adding background colors to each individual "site" as well - that too will be in the db This is exciting!
Google does not care about your site appearance. your site content is more important....you need unique content on your site in order to rank well in google....
I agree with brad ,also Pandadan. The most important is content,,and the html is the point. Thats it.