I’m about to launch a multi-domain affiliate sites which have one thing in common which is content. Reading about the problem with duplicate content and Google I’m a little worried that the parent domain or sub sites could get banned from the search engine for duplicated content.
If I have 100 sites with similar look and feel and basically same content with some minor element changes, how will I go on preventing banning, indexing these correctly?
Should I should just prevent sub-sites from been indexed completely with robots?
If so how will people be able to find their site… I actually think the parent is the one that should only be indexed to avoid, but will love to her other expert thoughts.
Google have recently released an update that will allow you to include a link tag in the head of pages that are using duplicated content that point to the original version, they’re called canonical links and they exist for the exact reason you mention, to be able to use duplicated content without penalisation
For more information look here..
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
This doesn’t mean that your sites with duplicated content will be ranked well for the duplicated content but it does mean the original is ‘protected’. For decent ranking in the duplicated sites you will need to provide unique content