Question for those with multiple sites

[anks106]

For those of you who have built many sites, do you work off a base template for every site and just fill in articles and information. I am just starting at this, and want ot know if that would be a bad idea. Would search engines not like it that all my sites are off the same template or would that not matter?

Thanks

[Alphen]

I use a base template in my content management system. For every website I build I basically only change the style sheet (different colors, different sizes, different fonts, etc) and some variables (site title, urls, and some generic shortcuts). But after I've done that I will fill this new site with completely new content.

As far as I know search engines don't really mind if the template looks the same - the content does matter and that is completely different for every website.

[ferraristi]

I agree. I use a couple of different templates as I have sites with different themes. The sites that are related to the same theme use the same templates but use different colours etc.

The thing is that the sites obviously have different URLs and the directory names, file names, page titles and content are all different, which as far as the search engines are concerned makes them unique.

I also use different variations of the same template within a site so that I can alter layout around slightly dependant upon the type of page it is. For instance on some pages I might not want to display adsense as it doesn't make sense to do so, and so the template for that page is slightly different.

[graywolf]

Using the exact same template for all of your sites with the same div's, span's, and class names could create a nice easy to track footprint, you may not want to leave.

[zivkovicp]

For small or medium sites (pretty much every NEW site of mine) I use standard CMS (Content Management System) or Blogging software (I like WordPress).

This lets me put up a site in minutes, literally. I then pick a theme and upload my content.

I don't mind leaving things as default at the begining because there are only a few visitors and I'm not high up in the search results... once they get rolling though, I tend to start modifying and optimizing the templates.

Sometimes, if there are only a few pages (and I intend on leaving it that way) then I will start from scratch and do maximum "onpage" SEO.