I am working on the website for a real estate team, with a head broker-company boss, and four other agents.
Currently we have one website, say for example www.davepatterson.com, containing a blog from the boss, property listings, one page detailing all those in the team, and so on.
The site is on a single website host, with a single wordpress installation - that is one mysql database and one bunch of php files
The boss now wants the other team members to have their own websites - with their own domain names www.fredsmith.com, www.suejones.com - but for most of the content to be pulled from the existing single WP installation at www.davepatterson.com
All that is going to change is that on the team member websites things like the header/footer information will change*, on the team page their information/photo will be at the top (rather than the boss), the Contact Us form will go that team member’s email, and that the boss’ blog will not appear, to name but a few differences.
I see the potential for a few problems regarding this different-URLS-duplicate-content scheme, and wonder if anybody has seen this setup before, and may have some solutions?
For one, as a number of pages are going to remain unchanged - such as property listings - then we might have a duplicate content with search engines like Google.
From my research, I don’t believe duplicate content is directly penalised, rather it won’t be known who will rank highest for a certain keyword amongst all our team member’s websites. In a sense, they will all be competing against each other for search engine placement.
I have my concerns, and have expressed them to my boss.
I could make sure that the <meta name=“robots” content=“noindex” /> was added on pages containing duplicate content, and then those websites would not show at all in Google.
Any advice would be appreciated.
- This will be achieved by looking at the PHP variable $_SERVER[HTTP_HOST] and determing what original URL was typed in. I’ve seen at least one WP plugin that claims that it “…alters
Weblog Title, WordPress Address URL and Blog Address URL on the fly based on $_SERVER[‘SERVER_NAME’]”.