Duplicate content risk

[wmuser]

There is a company which is offering horoscopes to a websites.
The way they do that is you are creating a subdomain,seting it up to resolve to their IP,telling them your design prefrences and they set it up.

I know tens of big websites which has partnered with them now there is the same content on all websites.

I am wondering,is it possible that search engines can penalize my website if i partner with that company too and place the same content?

There is a link back to original provider on every page.

[caveman]

Well there are numerous issues. If you're opening up the subdomain just for this, keeping in mind that the subdomain is technically a different site, then you can determine for yourself how much risk you want to take, by how you link from your main site to your subdomain.

Your subdomain probably won't rank because it is dup content.

I would try to find out if the site offering the program is spamming or penalized in some way, because if they are, and you link TO THEM from your subdomain, it could darken the reputation of your subdomain, which is worse than your subdomain simply not ranking. If that happened, and you linked to your subdomain from your main site, that might even hurt your main site to some extent (not sure about that, and many other factors involved).

[Quadrille]

I agree there are possible downsides to this idea.

What I cannot see is any upside - what will you gain by setting up a domain which perfectly duplicates thousands of others, and will never be listed in search engine results.

What will the web gain by having a few thousand more clone sites?

Why would you go to all this trouble simply to provide a promotional link to the 'main site'?

They gain. You don't.

[wmuser]

Quadrille there are about 20 websites,not thouzands,horoscopes content is often sindycated by websites,thats not 1001 clone of the same website,your gain is that your vistors are able to read their horoscopes.

Time will show if that was a good or bad idea

[caveman]

Personally I think that if it's providing interesting content that is appealing to your site visitors, and if the site that is providing it is not spamming, etc., then it's not a bad thing. Not all content on a site has to rank to justify its existance.