site.com and 2nd.site.com and SEO

[BobMane]

this is for an ecomm site

so if i have site.com

and want to make a live clone 2nd.site.com

will penalty or something bad as a result?

note: I will be taking orders on both sites and trying different backend stuff on each. both will have same branding. overtime i will get rid of 2nd.site.com

[BobMane]

ok thanks...one more thing. do you know if this applies exactly the same to magento sites or are you talking about any website in general.

[TheOptimizationIdiot]

NP hope it works for you and it should apply to any site you can put on it's own subdomain. I'm really not very familiar with magneto, but the only thing I can think of you might have to do, depending on exactly how magneto works wrt linking is perform a string-replace to get the subdomain out of the links/canonical.

So, for code-set2.example.com:
echo str_replace('code-set2.example.com','www.example.com',file_get_contents('http://code-set2.example.com'.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']));

Would change a link like this:
http://code-set2.example.com/some-page.ext

to:
http://www.example.com/some-page.ext

Obviously for code-set1.example.com you just change code-set2.example.com to code-set1.example.com in the replace.