Hi guys We have a website, which does welll in the search engines, ranks on the first page for most terms and probable averaging at about 7th place. We get a resonable about of sales through the site. However we have done a deal with a whole load of other portals things like MSN and so on. We have allowed them to show the entire site on there servers like this: Oursite: www.oursite.com Their sydercation: msn.oursite.com We get quite a few sales through these sites, but we have to pay them a percentage of the profit. My Question: At persent we have prevented the search engines from indexing the syndercated versions. In fear of the duplication filter. We were wondering if we took off this restriction and let the search engine index the copies what would happen. Would the MSN version rank a lot better than our site because it is trusted, would our site get kicked out becuase it is a duplicate? Any advice would be greatly appericated.
Hi there Nixies, My hunch on this one is that it would probably be ok to allow to the search engines to index the syndicated versions. As long as your main site is already indexed, any devaluement due to duplicate content would be assigned to the syndicated sites and not your main one.
Good question, and based on what I've read, you did the right thing by blocking their sites in your robots.txt file. But I do have a question of my own - whose sites are getting syndicated and where, yours (on their sites), or theirs (on yours - it appears this is the latter)? (Also please bear in mind that search engines no longer consider subdomains to be separate domains for SEO purposes.)
It's our site on there domain name (I've mailed you the domain names so you can check them out) Sorry don't want to make them public.
That's perfectly understandable. I've sent you a reply, and will be getting back in touch with you either tomorrow or Wednesday.