I have an idea for my web design site, I want to have 2 or 3 different versions of the site to display versitility and not to scare off the more conservitive types with my current design (it's pretty out there) so I was going to do a splash page allowing visitors to choose the version of the site they'd like to see. My only worry is duplicate content. If the images are all different and named different will the crawlers see them different? my guess is not so if I use robots.txt to dissallow the other directories will that prevent me from the duplicate content penalty or if I put them in subdomains, will that work? The text will be the same in each version, just the page layout and design will be different. Thanks in advance, Lisa
if you are creatining 3 diff version but keeping them the same why not put rel="nofollow" on the second 2?
The answer is so easy. Just use a different CSS with the same site. For example let the user choose on the splash site, then save his choice in some way (cookie, session information, ..) and load the right css dynamically depending on the users choice. That way you won't have to reproduce the content either. But i wouldn't use a get variable in the url (index.php?css=1&page=home), as then search engines probably see the sites as different. Hope that helps you, grtz, Nick
If all you're doing is using a CSS style switcher, then you don't need to worry about dup content. The stylesheet may change, but the data will remain the same. You don't need to change the URL - it can all be cookie based.
unfortunately I don't know how to do the css thing, I'm limited to text in that regard - I did try to figure out how to do it but was totally lost. if I did the nofollow on the splash page, wouldn't that prevent the robots from crawling the whole site? Wouldn't it be better to put the pages in separate directories and disallow those directories from being followed? Lisa
no, you have 3 links, the first is the one that gets indexed and followed by search engines, the second and third have the nofollow. the css style thing is pretty easy if ya can get it too work, also if you have php pages there is also a php version out there
The nofollow should better be done else imho. You should create a directory for every template and block robots from the other two with the robots.txt file, then you won't have trouble with people linking into your site. But that stuff is more complex then the css thing. Css really really is easy. Don't read on w3c.org but on some site that explains it to you like h**p://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp If you don't know css and you want a site with 3 layouts, i think you might have some work to do dude, grtz Nick
You don't need 3 different versions of the whole site - just the HTML template and 3 CSS files. All you need is a style switcher script (There are plenty of JS versions available if you can't have PHP)... Duplicate URL's are not an issue here folks...
Lol SEbasic, of course there is only one version needed. But i was afraid sigma would gave up on css and create 3 diff sites. In that case he should be blocking 2 of them. However Sigma, just go for the css please
can this really be done with css? I see that I could have a single design and change the colours etc., but I'm talking about compleatly different design like one looks like a box that's got a blue and white checkerboard and the other one is a circle with a sunset gradient (that's not it but that's what I mean about different, look at my webdesign site and see what I'm talking about for the original layout, the second would look like a corporate site, solid colours, box shape etc. if this can be done in css, does anyone know of a site that does it so I can see? Thanks much... everyone is helpful but I'm still confused... oh, and would php work better maybe? Don't know php either but will jump in and learn whichever will work better. Thanks, Lisa by the way, I only created a new template for one other version, after the template was done it was 5 minutes to create new pages with the new template