Dear members, I've got a little problem. I'm working on a site where it's possible to create a custom of the site itself. You can assign colours, fonts, etc. but the content is always the same! I'm thinking of 2 solutions: 1) create a subdomain for every user with his own custom or 2) via index.php?custom=username load the fonts etc I think the first solution will certainly cause a duplicate content problem, because google sees a subdomain as a diffferent site, and all the content is the same. What do you think is the best solution? Thanks in advance. -Raymond
Second one would be my opinion. This would be like affiliate links and should not cause a problem with google.
Use robots.txt to filter out the ?custom=* part and only index.php and other pages will be spidered... not those featuring ?custom=*.
Depending on the level of customisation you want to allow, stylesheet switching may be your best solution. Mostly this is done by uploading a number of stylesheets, and allowing the user to click on one and saving their preference as a cookie. There's a good explanation on A List Apart somewhere. If you want to allow users to select any colour, font size or font style, you could again store that in a cookie and use that to determine what styles are displayed. This way, you won't have any problems with duplicate content.
1. You'd have to use a NOINDEX/NOFOLLOW on the subsequent subDomains 2. This method should be fine. So you can use either if done properly really. More on Duplicate Content Issues On Dupe Penalties: Hope that all helps some....