Forum Moderators: phranque
He has a seasoned, respected job placement site. But one practice he uses may cause him problems. I suspect that it's becuase he hasn't been caught yet.
He approaches other site owners who have their own sites that are related to my client's demographic. No bad neighborhood stuff here. They agree to sponsor "job center" pages as genuine usability value for their viewers. The job center pages however are served from my client's server. They have the partner site's masthead but each has otherwise exact, duplicate content. So you might have agreeablepartner1.myclient.com, agreeablepartner2.myclient.com, etc. as the domain.
The only thing different about all these pages is the masthead and the color scheme to match the partner's look and feel.
These pages have genuine value for the partner sites' users, but they are nevertheless substantially duplicate content.
Is this going to be an issue?
I can think of two reasons:
1. To capture usage statistics
2. To "brand" the listings to the partner
Note that (2) isn't accomplished completely, as it has his site's name as well as the partner's in the domain name.
If he is only interested in (1), he can still do the subdomain (or just a subdirectory) and immediately redirect to the main site.
If he is interested in (2), why not have a robots.txt that denys all spiders?
He can't have his cake and eat it too. He either has to do it all under one site, or tell the spiders to go away on the duplicates.
It's all about 2. To "brand" the listings to the partner. The stats would be a distant consideration.
Good point-- he should use robots.txt as he's so invested in the job center pages that it would be hard to give them up.
Thanks for the insight. Solves the problem.
