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We are a known vertical site and are considered to be expert in our domain. We have huge information and that information is our strength. Recently we have been offered to get associated with two very large horizontal portals (e.g. Yahoo, MSN or AOL in USA).
These two portals wish to start a new channel/category and have content from us. It would be a barter deal, they will get pages and we will get more eyeballs. The new sites will reside on our servers in different subdomains e.g. giant1.mysite.com and giant2.mysite.com. Both these sites will have co-branded header and footer. One of the sites will give a link back to our site. The link will point to our site's home page.
Our entire site (almost) is going to be replicated for the two portals including product information pages, articles, photos and even forum. Though we will have control over title, description and meta tags, we have little control over the page content.
What would be the implications of this? We are a lesser PR site than those two giants. Will we gain PR or will our pages loose Google rank to their pages. Or will Google panalize us for having multiple pages.
We cannot go back on the deal. I wish to know what can be done to maximize the benefits or minimizing the damage?
Thanks in advance.
- You could force them to add a noindex, nofollow to the duplicate co-branded subdomains
- You could block the engines from viewing the duplicate co-branded subdomains via robots.txt or meta tags
- You could allow users to view the content on the co-branded subdomains but detect the SE crawlers and redirect them to the original source
- You could put a time delay on the content release. So the original source site publishes the content on Monday and the duplicate co-brands get the content on Tuesday. That, in addition to a link from the co-brands back the source, should be enough time for the engines to sort out the original source.
I'm sure there are other options you could pursue.
It really depends what your goals are for the deal.
All the above mentioned options are workable. Let me see what's written in the agreement.
Do you think rel="canonical" will help? Since all the copies are going to rest on my servers only and they will be served from giant1.mydomain.com, giant2.mydomain.com etc. Google says that rel="canonical" works for the subdomains. And by using this directive, we are giving a strong hint to Google as which copy needs to be considered as original.
What do you think?
