seperate themes for same site

[typophile]

I am building a site for my company, we are a newly merged organization trying to put together two very different areas of expertise into one company. I want to build two versions of the site in which eveything is the same except for the meta content. One site's meta content would relate to the first area of expertise and one to the second. Do they have to be on seperate servers or can they just be in seperate subdirectories of the same server with different urls?

[agerhart]

it can be the second option you suggested

[mivox]

Either way, I think one of the sites would probably see it's ranking suffer for being nothing but duplicate content. Meta content isn't weighted that heavily any more...

I'd say do one site in two areas:

expertise1.company.com - content and meta data related to area of expertise #1
expertise2.company.com - content and meta data related to area of expertise #2
www.company.com - small (2-3 pages) section with the "about our company" data, with prominent links to each 'area of expertise'

-or-

Do three totally separate sites:
www.expertise1.com, www.expertise2.com, www.company.com (pretty self explanatory)

[paynt]

I second mivox :)

Mirror sites lend you no opportunity for maximizing your optimization for your site and in fact often hinder your chances.

[mburgess]

Definitely agree with mivox. In doing so, you're able to optimize the company pages for specific key phrases as well as focus on each separate business segment without confusing the subject.

[WebGuerrilla]

I third Mivox. :-)

Mirrored sites with duplicate content (other than title and meta data) worked quite well a couple of years ago, but now search engines are much better at spotting it and penalizing it.

[Robert Charlton]

>>I want to build two versions of the site in which eveything is the same except for the meta content<<

typophile - Mivox's posting is right on. Your comments about meta content suggest that you share a basic and common misconception about what meta tags can do. Meta tags are not magic bullets that assure good ranking. Meta content and page content need to be related. If the content isn't there on the page, including it in meta tags generally isn't going to help.

Additionally, page focus is an important component of optimization... and it's very unlikely that the same page content will be focussed on two different sets of search targets.

And yes, dupe content on mirror sites will get you in trouble.

[typophile]

>If the content isn't there on the page, including it in meta tags generally isn't going to help...

The content is there,we are combining these two areas of expertise in synergy so the content will contantly refer to both areas on most pages. The problem is that this synergy is very new so it is very unlikeley that a user will combine search terms that refer to both, thus my idea about mirrored sites. Anyone have a better idea?