: How can I create multiple mini-sites with similar/duplicate content without hurting my search engine rank? Essential background: I run a small company that lets members of the public post handwritten

@Samaraweera270

Google Webmaster Tools has the following suggestions:


Google does not recommend blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools.


I personally like the idea of 301 redirects. Choose your main domain and all of your other domains that contain the duplicate content can do 301 redirects so your domain name is taken into account for SEO, but you don't get dinged for duplicate content.

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@Ravi8258870

Yes, I think it will - it's duplicate content. The solution is to differentiate the content so, based on a very cursory glance at your site, I'd suggest dropping the "boilerplate" content (the stuff that explains the concept, ts & cs, etc.) and put that on a dedicated "about" page (or pages), and instead populating with content relevant to each EDM on its respective page.

That'd serve a usability goal, too, in the sense that it'd make the topic of the page (and therefore the letter the user is writing) clearer.

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