Duplicate Sites (1,100 sites - 25,000 pages)

Need your advice...I'm not the expert!

[nealford1]

I'm sure this has been asked and answered. However, I have 1,100 sites that will be duplicated. The only difference is in the domain name. Those will be different as will the name of the site, ie. tomfood.com, edfood.com, billfood.com. Outside of that, the sites will be the same. Just think of franchising. I have heard much about the dilemma of duplication with Google, Yahoo, etc. and being banned. Not what I want. I have a central site I want all sites to link to... ie. allfood.com. Any suggestions? My biggest concern is doing it wrong myself or hiring a supposed SEO group that screws it up and our exposure.

Thanks...

[nealford1]

an addendum...this is not duplicating sites for exposure of the main site. Every site is a stand-alone business unit with unique ownership not controlled by us. We would prefer to link them to the main site for exposure to the group we have created

[nancyb]

when you say duplicated, do you mean all the content is the same for every site? all pages the same with the same text?

[nealford1]

Some content will be different. The about us section, specific regional info., etc. We will be using a content manager to change this info. on the sites.

[HenryUK]

I understand that there must be great advantages in a business sense to setting up multiple sites like this. I have a feeling however that one of the disadvantages is that you're going to get banned for duplicate content unless you ensure that the duplicate pages are not indexable.

It might be upsetting for you, but you are going to have to live with that I think.

As a user searching on "food", I'd be fairly annoyed to find that the first 1100 sites all had basically the same content. Google knows this and that's why it does its best to enforce rules re duplicate content.

just MHO.