I have a multimedia rich (i.e. bandwidth heavy) template on a domain of one of my websites and so thought it might be a good excercise to use a traditional magazine style template on a sub-domain for those of us that don’t have uber-fast broadband, but rather than run two separate sites power the content from a single database.
In other words, two domains are effectively one site but presented with different templates.
So I have a cpl of q’s
1.0 Is this possible with Wordpress?
2.0 Would I get punished by Search Engines?
Well as long as you are running different content in each then they will be considered to be completely separate. If you feed the same content to both then one will be considered a duplicate of the other. This is the same regardless of whether you use a single database or multiple databases - the number of databases you use is irrelevant to the search engines as they only see the resultant pages and not where the info comes from.
Yes - two ways to do it
1A. use a prefix on the front of the table names so that the tables from multiple copies of WordPress can be stored in the same database
1B. Turn on multisite and run them all from a single copy of WordPress.
No - search engines do not know that all the sites are running from the same script.