2 replies to this topic

[cml]

Hi,

I work for an insurance/financial services company that has its own main web site, but also has provided sites for thousands of its individual offices and agents. These agent sites have about 5 unique pages of content and then the rest of their site shares content with the main company web site.

We would like for the agent sites to appear in the search engines if someone searches on their individual names, but I'm wondering how it will look if someone does a search on our company name and thousands of agent sites are listed, some possibly outranking our main company site.

Also, I'm concerned that the search engines might think we have duplicate content because part of their sites do share content with the main site.

Has anyone ever dealt with this sort of search engine optimization? Or does anyone have any advice on how to best approach this?

Thanks!
-Colleen

[Mel]

Hi Coleen:

If the main site and the sub sites (especially if there are thousands of them)share duplicate content the search engines are going to eventually not list and/or rank well the subsite pages with duplicate content.

Why have the duplicate content on the subsite if the sites link to the main site? Just link to the main site content making sure its opened in a new window, and let the five or so pages in the subsite stand on their own.

The links to the main site will be great for the main sites PR and I would suppose that somewhere on the main site will be a list of links to the individual offices and agents, which will be good for them.

If you went a step further and optimized the subsites for local terms so that they ranked well for local terms, there would be no problem of them out ranking the main site on the major terms, especially if the links to the main site are done right.

[dimok]

Duplicate content is very bad. SEs do define duplicates quickly and they can penalize both sites that have duplicate content. The solution can be:

1. Change the content a little. I don't think it will be so difficult for your agents.

2. As Mel said simply put link to your main site.

If you have lots of agents' sites it great deal to put link to main site on each of them - it would grow your PageRank and Link Reputation, you easily could try to get top ranked of some targeted keywords by having backward link with that keywords from sites of the same theme.

Such situation is very good for optimizing you main site.